Re: HTTP 500 - Internal server error

Cláudio Teixeira wrote:

> CSS validator has always worked fine, but in the last months it
> started to generate the following error:
>
> HTTP 500 - Internal server error.

It seems to come from the CSS Validator, so it's apparently a bug there, 
though the ultimate problem is in your style sheet.

> http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=www.ua.pt

So the problem page is http://www.ua.pt . It has valid markup, and the 
first few style sheet referred to by it are checked OK, but the problem 
seems to be with the style sheet
http://www.ua.pt/css/StyleSheet.css
which results in the message
Servlet has thrown exception:javax.servlet.ServletException: Timed out
(and probably the 500 error code, but IE doesn't tell).

Checking with
http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/csscheck.cgi
which is an old CSS checker, largely limited to CSS 1, but useful for 
many purposes, I find that the style sheet begins with

(or, technically, undefined octets that become such characters when 
interpreted as ISO-8859-1 data), which looks suspiciously like a Byte 
Order Mark (BOM) at the start of UTF-8 encoded data. That's more or less 
garbage in CSS terms, and seems to trigger a bug in the W3C CSS 
Validator.

This should get fixed if you edit the style sheet using a simple editor 
and remove the extra data at the start, or open it in a UTF-8 capable 
editor and save it in ASCII encoding (or ISO-8859-1, or something like 
that), which should result in having the BOM dropped.

> We didn't upgrade or change the css files, so we have no idea on
> what's wrong, and the error is extremely generic.

I guess the CSS Validator somehow changed its processing of character 
encodings, then.

Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2008 21:28:55 UTC