Checking for Coding Errors

I am trying to check my site, http://www.strongfamilies.us, for coding errors using http://validator.w3.org. However, this site states the following:

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No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to windows-1252.

None of the standards sources gave any information on the character encoding labeling for this document. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. As a fallback solution, the "windows-1252" encoding was used to read the content and attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents. Before defaulting to windows-1252 the validator also tried to read the content with the following encoding(s), without success: UTF-8.

Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document.

No Character encoding declared at document level

No character encoding information was found within the document, either in an HTML meta element or an XML declaration. It is often recommended to declare the character encoding in the document itself, especially if there is a chance that the document will be read from or saved to disk, CD, etc.

See this tutorial on character encoding for techniques and explanations.
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I read through the tutorial yet I cannot figure out how to add the necessary coding needed for this site to check for errors. If someone could help me with this, I would surely appreciate it. Thanks.
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
Add this between the head tags:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
 
Thank you for your response. I just added your recommendation to the meta section on http://www.strongfamilies.us/participantreg.php:

<title>The "Standing Up To Bullying" Conference</title>
<meta name="description" content="Introducing the latest research, this bullying conference is designed to empower educators with skills to eradicate school bullying and violence.">
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content=.....

and I got 'Sorry! This document can not be checked' when checking errors with The W3C Markup Validation Service.

More specifically, I am getting the following error code: Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 230 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.
The error was: utf8 "\x94" does not map to Unicode.


I have no idea what this means. Please advice. Thank you.
 
I found the right character code to use that http://validator.w3.org accepts. However, it seems that this site is giving me a lot of false negative readings. It lists about 114 errors on one page. Many of the errors have to do with the use of < and >. When I remove either of these characters, the whole page goes high-wire. I'm really confused about this validation site!
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
A lot of your errors are due to your use of XHTML syntax, but calling HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE.
 
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