Rendering "special characters" and html validation

[Armand Karlsen]

On this page of my website: http://www.zen62775.zen.co.uk/rigs.html
the W3C html validator claims that there are some bytes it cannot interpret
in line 49 of the html source as UTF-8. If I force ISO-8859-1 encoding,
however, the page will validate correctly but displays a warning about the &
character on the same line, saying that & is the "first character of a
delimiter but occurred as data". Is there any way to remedy this
problem/issue?

Secondly, the plus-minus (plus symbol immediately above a dash) symbol on
the same line of the html source does not render on my copy of Firefox 1.0
or Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1, instead appearing as a question mark. Does
this happen on other browsers, is there any way to make this character
render correctly?

[Sherm Pendley]

Armand Karlsen wrote:

On this page of my website: http://www.zen62775.zen.co.uk/rigs.html
the W3C html validator claims that there are some bytes it cannot
interpret in line 49 of the html source as UTF-8. If I force ISO-8859-1
encoding, however, the page will validate correctly
What do you mean by "force ISO-8859-1 encoding"?

Obviously the page is really 8859-1; if you put the correct content-type in
the page header, you wouldn't need to force the validator to ignore the
incorrect information that's in there now. What did you hope to accomplish
by misrepresenting the encoding, anyway???
but displays a warning
about the & character on the same line, saying that & is the "first
character of a delimiter but occurred as data". Is there any way to remedy
this problem/issue?
That has nothing at all to do with encoding. Regardless of the encoding,
ampersands must be represented correctly in HTML, as "&".
Secondly, the plus-minus (plus symbol immediately above a dash) symbol on
the same line of the html source does not render on my copy of Firefox 1.0
or Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1, instead appearing as a question mark. Does
this happen on other browsers, is there any way to make this character
render correctly?

You can't really *force* anything. All you can do is provide the correct
entity for the character you want to display, which is "±". If you
have a browser that doesn't display that correctly, report the bug to that
browser's author.

sherm--

--
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Hire me! My resume: http://www.dot-app.org

[Armand Karlsen]

"Sherm Pendley" <sp******@dot-app.org> wrote in message
news:no********************@adelphia.com...

What do you mean by "force ISO-8859-1 encoding"?

Obviously the page is really 8859-1; if you put the correct content-type in the page header, you wouldn't need to force the validator to ignore the
incorrect information that's in there now. What did you hope to accomplish
by misrepresenting the encoding, anyway???

Overriding the "default" page encoding in the W3C html validator. I had the
page in UTF-8 so I wouldn't have to juggle encodings if I were to put in
accents and other characters.

That has nothing at all to do with encoding. Regardless of the encoding,
ampersands must be represented correctly in HTML, as "&amp;".

Is there a website/page with the correct representations of such symbols?

You can't really *force* anything. All you can do is provide the correct
entity for the character you want to display, which is "&plusmn;". If you
have a browser that doesn't display that correctly, report the bug to that
browser's author.

Replacing the plus-minus in the source with &plusmn; made the symbol come up
correctly. The browsers apparently didn't understand the character directly.

[Sherm Pendley]

Armand Karlsen wrote:

Overriding the "default" page encoding in the W3C html validator. I had
the page in UTF-8 so I wouldn't have to juggle encodings if I were to put
in accents and other characters.
That's the problem - the page *isn't* encoded in UTF-8, it's ISO-8859-1. The
"encoding" attribute you used in the page is wrong. That's why overriding
the encoding worked around the problem - you told the validator what the
correct encoding is, and told it to ignore the incorrect information it
found in the page itself.
Is there a website/page with the correct representations of such symbols?
Somewhere on the W3 site, I'd imagine... (click, click, click...) Ah, here
we go:

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html>
Replacing the plus-minus in the source with &plusmn; made the symbol come
up correctly. The browsers apparently didn't understand the character
directly.

The browsers I tested - Mozilla and Safari - both understand it fine, once
the encoding was declared correctly. The problem isn't the character, the
problem is that you're telling the browser the document was UTF-8, when in
fact it was 8859-1 encoded.

sherm--

--
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
Hire me! My resume: http://www.dot-app.org

[Lachlan Hunt]

Sherm Pendley wrote:

Armand Karlsen wrote:

On this page of my website: http://www.zen62775.zen.co.uk/rigs.html
the W3C html validator claims that there are some bytes it cannot
interpret in line 49 of the html source as UTF-8. If I force ISO-8859-1
encoding, however, the page will validate correctly

If you're going to declare UTF-8, you had better learn how to use it
correctly.
http://lachy.id.au/blogs/log/2004/12...unicode-part-1
http://lachy.id.au/blogs/log/2004/12...unicode-part-2
http://lachy.id.au/blogs/log/2005/01...unicode-part-3
Regardless of the encoding, ampersands must be represented correctly
in HTML, as "&amp;".

Technically, not always for HTML. It is acceptable to leave both "&"
and "<" unencoded, such as when followed by a space, a new line and a
few other situations; but it is a very good practice to always encode
them anyway. In XHTML, however, you are always required to encode them
correctly.

--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
http://GetFirefox.com/ Rediscover the Web
http://GetThunderbird.com/ Reclaim your Inbox

[C A Upsdell]

Armand Karlsen wrote:

Is there a website/page with the correct representations of such symbols?

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/res_entities.htm