Validator Page Cannot Be Displayed for My Websites (Resolved)

To All,

This issue has been resolved.  I wish to thank Annette Read at S.A.M. 365 Limited, www.sam365.com , for assisting me in discovering the source of the problem.  It seems that, with a new iteration of the W3C CSS Validator in 2006, two things that I was doing in my external stylesheets (and had been doing for some time without problem) caused significant problems.  One of these may be a validator error; the other was apparently of my own creation.  Here is an excerpt of what I wrote to Annette, for anyone who may be having similar problems:

"I decided to inspect one of my .css files.  I realized that I had enclosed the entire body of each file in SGML comment delimiters.  As per CSS2 syntax and basic data types at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html ,

CSS also allows the SGML comment delimiters ("<!--" and "-->") in certain places, but they do not delimit CSS comments. They are permitted so that style rules appearing in an HTML source document (in the STYLE element) may be hidden from pre-HTML 3.2 user agents. See the HTML 4.0 specification ([HTML40]) for more information.

My intent was exactly what was written here, i.e., to hide the style rules from prying eyes.  I have had this construct in place since I initially developed my CMS and it appears to be properly formed.  As noted in my initial email, the error began occurring when W3C changed the validator page in 2006.  This means that either there is a bug in the validator or I am misusing the SGML comment delimiters.

In any event, I just removed all of these from my stylesheets and, voila! -- the validator is working.  Unfortunately, it looks like I have also introduced some .css errors along the way which I must now fix.

Annette, thank you very much for your help.  Your suggestion did the trick."

For reference, the CSS errors I introduced were created by the inclusion of a "</style"> tag at the end of each of my external style sheets (without an opening "<style>" tag).  I suspect I did this during my early days of learning CSS.  Removing this tag from each of my stylesheets removed all errors.

It is nice to know that there is a community out there willing to assist when webmasters encounter problems such as this.  I know a number of people looked into this problem, and wish to thank everyone for their efforts.

Ken


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ken Anderson 
To: www-validator-css@w3.org 
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 5:34 PM
Subject: Validator Page Cannot Be Displayed for My Websites


Dear Sirs:

I have been validating my web pages using XHTML 1.0 (Transitional) and CSS 2.1 for at least two years.  Everything had been working fine.  When W3C made a change months ago to the CSS validator (now displaying a light blue validation box), CSS validation for my sites suddenly ceased to function.  I don't mean that my pages do not validate properly.  I mean that I simply get "the page cannot be displayed" when I insert any of my website URLs into the validator box:  www.tenspider.net, www.tenspider.com, www.vital-statistics.net or any of the other pages on my website.  I plug in the URL for a different website (not one of mine) and the validator works just fine.

This appears to be a domain issue.  It happens whether I go through the CSS button on my website, input manually, or validate another website and then simply substitute my URL.  Extremely frustrating.  Can you help?

(NOTES:  My web pages are generated using a PHP-based content management system of my own design.  I went to great lengths to insure that the CMS generates valid XHTML and CSS.  The suffix for my generated pages is ".html", not ".php".

Examples of validation strings I generate with my CMS (that don't work):
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.net%2Findex.html
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.net%2Fpets-animals%2Findex.html

Examples of alternate validation strings I have tried unsuccessfully:
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.net
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.com/
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.vital-statistics.net/
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.net/
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.net/index.html
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.tenspider.net/pets-animals/index.html

Example of a validation string that works:
     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.residual-rewards.com/

Thanks!

Sincerely,


Kenneth L. Anderson (Ken)
President, Ten Spider Enterprises
www.tenspider.net (home page)
www.tenspider.com
Email:  kanderva@comcast.net
Phone: (856) 691-7045

1671 Hubbard Lane
Vineland, New Jersey   08360-1910

The Ten Spider Enterprises website is an information metasite encompassing ten broad theme sets.  Established in February of 2003, it now comprises 398 pages of manually-edited information and resource links.  It is open for all to read.