HTML Validation

razsports · #1 (**permalink**) 02-01-2005, 10:21 AM

I was just wondering what the statement shown below all means?

"

I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents."

"Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on lines 329, 334, 337, 341, 346, 349 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication."

Sanjo · #2 (**permalink**) 02-01-2005, 02:37 PM

Can you post a link to the URL?

paulhiles · #3 (**permalink**) 02-01-2005, 04:10 PM

Hi razsports,

First things first, you'll need to add a doctype before your site will be accepted by the W3C validator. Try adding either an HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype or an XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype and then you'll be able to see what errors you need to fix in your code.

A Content-type meta tag is also a pre-requisite!
Try something like the tag below (a standard Western European / Latin-1 character set).
This will take care of your "Character encoding" error.

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

Paul

razsports · #4 (**permalink**) 02-01-2005, 04:20 PM

Paul,

Thanks :) You learn something new every day. With that coding you posted for me to add, do I add it to the start of my html or where the lines within the body?

I did another check with another site and doesn't look like I have much if any html errors. That being said,
I want no errors and perfect site :)

Again, thanks.

paulhiles · #5 (**permalink**) 02-01-2005, 05:12 PM

If you decide to go for HTML 4.01 Transitional, the head of your page will look something like this:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Sports: For Sports Directory, PPC Engine, Forums, Blogs, Radio, Site Reviews, Rumors, RPG</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="sports, sports ppc search engine, sports blogs, sports radio, sports rumors, sports forums, sports rpg">
<meta NAME="description" CONTENT="Search our human edited sports pages for rumors, wanted lists, site reviews, blogs and 
links to other sports related websites">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<META name="allow-search" content="yes">
<META name="audience" content="all">
<META name="robots" content="all, index, follow">
<META name="revisit-after" content="2 days">
<LINK REL=StyleSheet HREF="http://www.raz-sports.com/style.css" TYPE="text/css" MEDIA=screen>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.raz-sports.com/razsports.js"></script>
</head>

You could always go straight to XHTML 1.0, but the learning curve will be a little steeper... not huge, but if you're not used to validating and hand-coding, HTML 4.01 is probably your best bet!

Paul