Validator Criticism
All mark-up validators suffer from an inability to see the "big picture" on a web page. However they excel at picking up missed closing tags and other technicalities. This does not mean that the page will display as the author intended in all browsers.
DTD based validators are also limited in their ability to check attribute values according to many specification documents. For example, using an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE, bgcolor="fffff" is accepted as valid for the "body" element even though the value "fffff" is missing a preceding '#' character and contains only 5 (instead of 6) hexadecimal digits. Also, for the "img" element, width="really wide" is also accepted as valid. DTD based validators are technically not able to test for these types of attribute value problems.
Furthermore, even if validated, all web pages should be tested in as many different browsers as possible to ensure that the limitations of the validator are compensated for and that the page works correctly.
Read more about this topic: W3C Markup Validation Service
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