- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 10:49:19 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
- Cc: Risto Kaartinen <risto.kaartinen@welho.com>
On Wed, 3 Aug 2005, Olivier Thereaux wrote: > Your <head> is missing a <title>. We have often seen suggestions that this common error should be reported more directly - especially since it is a practically significant error (see e.g. "<title>: the most important element of a quality Web page", http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/good-titles ). Unfortunately it seems that there is no way to achieve that without major changes in the validator's structure. At present it can only signal that a required subelement is missing, not what subelement is missing. As a practical method, many people have adopted the habit of writing a <title> element right at the start of the <head> element. This may help against accidental omission of <title>, and it is a fairly logical order, too. Technically, the mutual order of subelements of <head> is free; so you can choose an order that looks good to you. But there's a catch. Sometimes the character encoding of a document can only be deduced (by a browser) from the information in a <meta> tag. This is unfortunate, but for such situations, it is probably best to write an element like <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"> as the first subelement of <meta>, and the <title> element next. The reason is that your <title> element might, now or in a revised version, contain non-ASCII characters, so things work better if the browser knows the encoding at that point. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2005 07:49:34 UTC