Re: Website help

Kevin Rollins wrote:
> I ran my friend's site http://www.parodycalfilms.com through the html validator 
> and got a lot of errors and complaints that didn't make much sense.
> Most of the complaints were about perfectly legitimate html that works in
> all browsers.

No, all of the "complaints" (errors and warnings) were about erroneous 
HTML that only works in all browsers because they have programmed with 
undefined error handling abilities to cope with markup a lot worse than 
yours.  The "it works for me" argument does not make the markup any more 
valid than it is.

1. Warning  Line 87 column 253: cannot generate system identifier for
    general entity "r".
2. Error  Line 87 column 253: general entity "r" not defined and no
    default entity.
3. Error  Line 87 column 254: reference to entity "r" for which no
    system identifier could be generated.
4. Info  Line 87 column 252: entity was defined here.

Those 4 errors/warnings/info are all for the same markup error.  To 
quote the explation given by the validator, which you should have read:

| An entity reference was found in the document, but there is no
| reference by that name defined. Often this is caused by misspelling
| the reference name, unencoded ampersands, or by leaving off the
| trailing semicolon (;). The most common cause of this error is
| unencoded ampersands in URLs as described by the WDG in "Ampersands in
| URLs".
| http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp

You must encode the ampersand in the URL as & like this:
<a href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=user/register&amp;r=109191">

5. Error  Line 93 column 21: there is no attribute "SRC".
6. Error  Line 93 column 83: there is no attribute "QUALITY".
7. Error Line 93 column 100: there is no attribute "PLUGINSPAGE".
8. Error Line 93 column 105: element "EMBED" undefined.
9. Error Line 93 column 207: end tag for element "EMBED" which is not
    open.

All of those errors are caused because the embed element (including all 
of its attributes) are undefined in the HTML 4.01 DTDs.  They are 
proprietary extensions which should not be used.  See the Flash Satay 
article to learn how to embed flash using valid markup.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Sunday, 14 August 2005 10:32:50 UTC