Trademark Character Entity Reference - not compliant

[dharrison]

Hi all

I am in the process of testing one of my customer's websites: www.storvite.com and as their product is trademarked, I have tried both character entity references: ™ and ™ and on W3 XHTML 1.0 validator, I am getting an error:

non SGML character number 153

Please help. Is there a workaround?

Any help gratefully received.

Thanks

[bingo2]

I too would like to know the answer to this one. Very frustrating!

[debase23]

I had a similar problem a few years ago, but similar on the most crudest level. I figured out that the page I was editing referred to a foreign language character set in the code. Or maybe it was the fact that it did not refer to a character set? Once I specified the Unicode, the little ™ guy was fine and showed up in all the browsers I tested.

I hazard to guess that the incorrect character set/lack of specification provides the wrong info to the Validator.

[heavener]

Quoting from The HTML Writers Guild website:

"There is currently no standard for TM or SM. The most universal way is to mark them up as smaller, superscripted text:
<SUP>TM</SUP>"

See http://www.hwg.org/resources/faqs/copyrFAQ.html for the rest of the article.

In fact, when HomeSite inserts the TM symbol, it uses the code above.

Best to you,
Michael

[wige]

I tested this on my web site, which validates as XHTML strict, and &trade; does validate in the W3C validator as well as Tidy and my SGML parser. However, when I checked your source code, the trademark character is shown as the TM character, not as &trade;. What software are you using to edit your site?

[philscanlan]

I believe you should be able to use characters like this if you serve the page as utf-8 character encoding. Using meta:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

and save your page in a text editor as utf-8 with no BOM (byte order mark) if your editor lets you do that.

or try using & #8482; instead of &trade;

[wige]

Also, please note, "non SGML character number" refers to the TM character, if &trade; was not recognized, the validator should have given you a different error, "invalid entity" or similar. If you got the same error message for both methods, your web page editor may be converting the &trade; tag that you entered into the TM character.

[Orion]

philscanlan is correct ™ and utf-8 encoding gives me valid in both xhtml 1.0 strict and transitional.. never checked 1.1 but I'm sure it's ok also.

[Keimos]

Hi all,

For ™ it is &(ampersand)#8482;for Trademark and works with

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

keimos

[toolameforyou]

Is there a workaround?

If none of the above works you could always make that bit an image (the whole trademark notice). It could appear as a small button or badge on the pages.

[dharrison]

I am using the 8482, but even in my forum post, it converts to TM. I use CuteHTML as my coding package and yes it does convert it for me sometimes.

Thanks Phil (and all of you really) I shall try the UTF-8 line and see what happens.

[DrTandem1]

Originally Posted by dharrison

I am using the 8482, but even in my forum post, it converts to TM. I use CuteHTML as my coding package and yes it does convert it for me sometimes.

Thanks Phil (and all of you really) I shall try the UTF-8 line and see what happens.

I'm not sure what you mean by "it converts to TM." The ™ (that's the 8482 version) is the way to go and it does validate.

By the way, you say that your client's product is trademarked. In that case, you do not want to use ™. You should use ® (this would be &#174 ending with the semicolon). The ™ is used to show a claim of a pending trademark while the ® is reserved (by law) for something that has actually been registered by the USPTO.

Of course, you're in the UK, and I'm speaking for the US and US trademarks.

[dharrison]

DT1, when I say it converts to ™, I (we) mean that even if we type in the character entity reference 8482, my HTML package automatically converts it to ™. I hope that makes sense.

Also I have no idea ref the trademark, etc. They use the trademark ™ alongside the company name on their literature, I was just following suit.

I shall get in touch with them though and check.

Thanks for that DT1, as always :)

[DrTandem1]

For "Eppogran," I don't find a US trademark. So, it may be a UK thing.

[dharrison]

It probably is solely UK DT1.

Also UTF-8 might be compliant but leaves a weird character of a black diamond with a question mark. ?!?

So now I don't know. Did you all see the ™ when you viewed the site or a load of goobledygook?