Thread: validate html

Wow, the music and ad finally stopped. What did I do? Perhaps I came through from the wrong page, but that music and background ad for Blue Voda really slows things down for us on dial-up; very frustrating.
Anyway, the real problem. I visited http://validator.w3.org and requested validation of one of my pages. It reported that it cannot validate "because in line 109 contained one or more bytes that cannot be interpreted as utf8" it also says "unable to extract a character encoding labeling". I have no idea what all this means, but is it a problem? And if so, is Blue Voda not publishing properly.

And what is line 109???
I also have no idea what it means without knowing what you page looks like...
Anyway I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as it displays ok.

Originally Posted by Pablo

And what is line 109???
I also have no idea what it means without knowing what you page looks like...
Anyway I wouldn't worry about it too much. As long as it displays ok.

Thanks Pablo, that is sort of what I think too, except I am worried because I am told that these types of things can have you dropped from the search engines. There are numerous other things coming up such as "no such thing as 'align:top' " and "attribute must be literal" referring to tables "width 100%" etc. But when I try to alter these the tables just don't display the right way. The validation report suggests using CSS, which I don't know well enough. I have been trying to follow a few tutorials, but most of them are obviously designed for people further ahead than I am.
In the future, I don't suppose they can build CSS into Blue Voda?

BlueVoda already uses CSS for object positioning and a few other HTML attributes. Version 7.0 also has some improvements over this, for example hyperlink styles.
I do not think search engines care about the syntax of your HTML, as long as the META tags are correct.