XHTML validation problem

https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.progressiveink.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&ss=1&verbose=1

That is your page validated as the validator sees it – you and it are looking at different lines.
The actual problem is in the sidebar;
“with undesirables and announcing God???s unconditional love freely to”

Thanks podz … got it validating again.

Help! I have exactly the same problem, but I can’t tell where the error is to save my life! The validator isn’t letting me see its version of the lines, so I’m pulling my hair out…

https://www.polimom.com

My error: Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 272, 275, 278, 305, 329 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.

Polimom: easy way –

Check the box next to show source, then revalidate. This provides a link to the relevant lines and from seeing them in situ as it were you may be able to figure out where they really live.

Better way –

Open your blog main page in your browser, and use whatever your browser offers for “view source”. Will open in a notepad window or some such. Copy the source output to a file and save it.

Now go download notepad2 from https://flos-freeware.ch (it’s free….). Install it. Open the source from your save operation in notepad2. In the menus at the top is a selection to “show line numbers”. Activate that.

Now you should see the line numbers that the validator is using. You’ll still have to figure out where the different theme files are “living” in the mass of numbers…. (And notepad2 is a wonderful little editor too….)

Have a look at your “Can you see the future” post. There are characters there that Firefox is showing as “question mark in a black diamond”, which means they aren’t part of the usual character set. At a guess, it’s closing quotes being rendered as fancy curved quotes of some kind.

Hi vkaryl –

Can’t get the validator to show me the source… but I used the notepad2, and find myself singularly unenlightened by what I find. I tried to validate the main page (https://www.polimom.com). The lines to which it referred are:

Line 301: </rdf:RDF> –>

Line 304: <div class=”title” id=”post-443″>

Line 307: Islamophobia?

Line 334: <!–<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=”https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#&#8221;

And all I found on Line 358 is text from a post!?!

I’m totally stumped.

Polimom, try changing the charset encoding for your blog to ISO-8859-1. That’s this line in the head section of your header.php file:

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

so you want that to look like:

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

And you probably will need to change the relevant area in your blog admin options section too.

As Les Bessant points out, you’ve got some “unusual” characters. Whatever you’re using to write your posts is adding fancy-dancy endquotes etc. Try the charset change and see if that fixes the problem, or at least part of it. If it does, then we can address how to manage the problem in future.

Wow! That was too strange.

Les, that was a great spot. I’ve been staring at this for 2 days and didn’t see it (darned trees in that big forest!)

So – there were three posts with oddball characters, all of which had done something strange with <i>some</i> quotation marks (but not all). Fixing those has me back in validation-land, with my one error that is slowly driving me insane, but so far not breaking things.

vkaryl – I write my posts directly into the admin “write” interface. I use the WYSIWYG in combination w/ the HTML pop-up. I’ve not used an external editor or anything else.

That charset isn’t looking good, btw. (ack!)

Okay, sometimes that helps and sometimes it doesn’t. I wouldn’t use the wysiwyg for that reason among others. I’m not going to get into a bunch of recriminations on that, but likeliest thing is that the reason you HAVE those “oddball” characters is BECAUSE of the wysiwyg (which is really NOT a great example of what’s available in that direction, btw.)

So what’s the last error?

The last error is:

document type does not allow element “noscript” here

It’s in the sidebar – should have been pretty inoffensive, but guess not.

Re: the WYSIWYG… yup. No doubt I’ll be killing that. lol.

Hmm. Gotta go look again…. I’m thinking you’ll need CDATA tags…. Hang on.

Yeah. In order to validate you’re going to need to enclose EVERY INSTANCE of <script></script> tags in this:

Opening tag just INSIDE the opening script line: //<![CDATA[

Closing tag just INSIDE the closing script line:
//]]>

Those positions can be tweaked some too, so if that doesn’t get it, post back and we’ll tweak a bit.

Oh. Try NOT enclosing “noscript” unless it’s within the script tagset….

Vkaryl, you just slipped into Greek on me. I tried last week to get this right, and failed miserably.

Can you tell me what you mean, specific to the code? For instance:

a href=”https://easy-web-stats.com/users/index.php”><script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=”https://easy-web-stats.com/users/whos_online.php?id=www.polimom.com”></script><noscript>JavaScript required!</noscript> /a

Thanks very much for all your help – and LesBessant’s – already. You’ve been very kind (as people seem to be here, always…)

See, that’s the problem with me looking at source. Don’t always see the right stuff….

That one you posted there shouldn’t be a problem because it’s an external file call. Any script which calls an external js file shouldn’t need CDATA wrapping at all. Or at least the stuff I use doesn’t. So now if that’s the places you’re getting the error on the noscript…. hmmm…. Can you place the noscript call inside the external file?

No – the external file’s host is totally unrelated to me. Ah well, it doesn’t appear likely to break anything.

I think I’m gonna call it good for now. The major problems, at least, are solved.

Thanks for your help and patience, vkaryl.

-p