Re: Thanks a lot

Frank,

I too, hate moving goalposts, but the recent changes to the validator did
not make your documents invalid--they already were.

(Below you'll find a single line you can add to your server config that
should fix all your documents, saving you the trouble of changing all the
pages that you've got the validator logo on.)

That said, I'm not sure the responses you've received have been quite
useful, and your initial message was also not helpful. Instead of asking why
this change was made, and asking for help understanding or fixing the
problem, you simply came to a conclusion that you should stop validating
your documents and remove the link to the validator.

What someone on this list should have done first is to tell you how to
easily fix the charset problem--as Martin alludes to below. In fact, I
should have done this, because I had the same problem when I first started
validating my pages, and thus knew the answer.

What you should do (wether or not you decide to continue use the validator),
is to add this line to your Apache config:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Note that this can usually be done in an .htaccess file, if you don't have
permission to change the main server configuration file. If you need a
little finer control, namely the ability to specify different character sets
for different pages, then you can use something like this:

AddType text/html;charset=utf-8 .html
AddType text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 .htm
AddType text/html;charset=ISO646-DE .de

This would allow you to have your ".html" pages sent as UTF-8, your ".htm"
pages sent as ISO Latin-1, and your ".de" pages sent with the ISO German
character set, for instance.

> At 05:49 01/12/03 -0500, Frank Tiggelaar wrote:
> >Over the past year we have taken great care to validate all new pages
> >and pages on our site which were changed in any way. We added the small
> >W3C logo to all of the pages we validated. Recently we found out that
> >none of the pages which validated some time ago are validated today -
> >suddenly 'character encoding' has become required.
>
> >Therefore we stopped validating our pages; we shall remove all 7,000
> >little W3c-validated logos from our websites.
>
> It would have been much easier to add a line or so of directives
> to your Apache server setup. And that would also have improved
> worldwide access to and readability of your site.
>

Received on Monday, 10 December 2001 13:49:13 UTC