- From: Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:14:29 +0900
- To: public-qa-dev@w3.org
I just found that http://validator.w3.org:8188/docs/errors.html#bad-char is totally outdated. Anybody wants to fix it? Regards, Martin. “non SGML character number ###” You've used an illegal character in your text. HTML uses the standard ISO8859-1 character encoding, and ISO8859-1 leaves undefined 65 character codes (0 to 31 inclusive and 127 to 159 inclusive); the validator has found one of these undefined characters in your document. The character may appear on your browser as a curly quote, or a trademark symbol, or some other fancy glyph; on a different computer, however, it will likely appear as a completely different character, or nothing at all. Your best bet is to replace the character with the nearest equivalent ASCII character, or to use an appropriate character entity. For more information on ISO8859-1, see Alan Flavell's excellent ISO8859-1/HTML reference. This error can also be triggered by formatting characters embedded in documents by some word processors. If you use a word processor to edit your HTML documents, be sure to use the "Save as ASCII" or similar command to save the document without formatting information. “`####' is not a valid character number” You'll get several occurrences of this error if you use the Cougar DTD. Cougar uses the 16-bit UCS-4 (a.k.a. "Unicode") character set instead of the 8-bit ISO8859-1 character set used by HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.2. It also defines mnemonic entities for various Unicode characters; for instance, the entity ™ is defined as the character entity ™, which is the Unicode trademark character. Unfortunately, the nsgmls executable used by the validator does not appear to have 16-bit character support compiled in, and so it chokes on these 16-bit character entities. These errors are not produced by anything in your document and should not otherwise affect the validation of your document, so you can pretty much ignore them.
Received on Thursday, 10 October 2002 01:14:35 UTC