Re: Validation bug

Kim Brooks Wei <kimi@kimbwei.com> wrote:

>I suppose that there's some obscure technical reason that even though I
>seemed to have the correct coding, my page wouldn't parse as html 

Without the filename extension -- ".html" or ".htm" -- the web server
software probably doesn't recognize the files as HTML and sends them to the
Validator as Text instead. The crucial difference between those two is that
while HTML has a specific format (tags and so on), Text files do not. To
enable the Validator to validate your files, and all strictly standards
conforming browsers to even display the files(!), you need to somehow
arrange for the web server software to recognize these files as HTML.


The "technical mumbo jumbo" version of this is that the web server probably
uses filename extensions to guess the file type and set the Content-Type
HTTP header, and when you omit the extension from the filename the server
gets confused and falls back to a default value for this header. Depending
on what specific web server software is used, there may be ways to alter
this behaviour. Either by changing the default to "text/html" instead of
"text/plain", or by explicitly specifying the type of each file, or by
making it use another method for determining the type of files.

In any case, this is a server configuration issue and you need to take it
up with your web hosting provider. There is nothing you can do in the HTML
files themselves to remedy this, but perhaps your hosting provider can
change it in a global configuration file for the server, or can provide
some way for you to control this behaviour in a local configuration file.


For instance, in the very popular Apache web server software, you can
create a text configuration file called ".htaccess" in each directory and
place this type of configuration directives there. And I seem to recall
that in Internet Information Server (Microsoft product, so very popular on
the Windows platform) your server administrator can use the graphical
configuration tools to set the type of each file individually.

It all depends on what kind of web server software is used, how it has been
configured, and what policies your hosting provider has for such things.



-- 
"Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs.   There is a long
 list of new features since Python 1.6, released earlier today. We don't plan
 on any new releases in the next 24 hours."  - From Python 2.0b1 Announcement

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2002 22:51:43 UTC