thank you sunfighter for taking the time to clean the code and see what it would look like. I will take out all the /> and replace with > in order to get errors down to as little as possible.
for a validator i use
http://validator.w3.org, in order to see my errors. Is this the best way to go about it or is there another way?
In response to the cross browser capability, do any of you have any really good websites or tips to go about learning how to see what kind of browser (or mobile) it is and then call the appropriate script? I'm assuming its a simple script/line. But my assumptions were wrong previously so idk