Validator puzzle

Dear HTML validator group,

I have been attempting to rewrite my default template for HTML 4.0 in
such a way that it was valid XHTML.  However I was unable to validate
my efforts (http://achilles.bu.edu/cas/template.html)
since the validator will not accept the lines:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="author" content="Charles Alexander Stewart" />

reporting (for the second of these lines)
     * Line 18, column 57:
  <meta name="author" content="Charles Alexander Stewart" />
                                                           ^
       Error: character data is not allowed here

I could find no reference to this in the HTML 4.0 specification, and
the reported error seems paradoxical given that the validator is happy
with the lines:

<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Charles Alexander Stewart" />

in the same script.

I hope this is not a waste of your time,

Dr. Charles Stewart
Dept. Computer Science, Boston University


PS. The script I sent to the validator begins with:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">             
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<html lang="en">

I called the validtor from a version of lynx with a forged USER_AGENT
header, using the URL
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://achilles.bu.edu/cas/template.html

I shall not change the contents of
http://achilles.bu.edu/cas/template.html until I receive a reply.

Received on Wednesday, 3 May 2000 00:45:13 UTC