Re: [VE][64] Error Message Feedback

Steve wrote:
> Validating http://www.bikerleatherz.com/sitemap.htm 

Firstly, before I get to the error you have reported, we must first deal 
with exactly what kind of document you are using:

<?xml version="2.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

There are numerous problems with this:
1. The XML declaration contains specifies version 2.0, yet there is no 
XML 2.0 defined yet.  There is currently only 1.0 and 1.1.

2. You've used an XML declaration, yet provided an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE and 
HTML 4 *is not* an application of XML, it is SGML.  While <?xml ...> is 
a valid SGML Processing Instruction, hence the validator does not report 
an error, it's quite obviously not what you intended.

Remove the XML declaration.

Also, you've attempted to specify the encoding as UTF-8 in the the XML 
declaration, yet that is ignored for text/html document.  You've also 
specified the character encoding in a meta element with conflicting 
information:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

You should change that to UTF-8 (as long as the document is actually 
encoded in UTF-8, not Windows-1252, or at least only uses the common 
US-ASCII subset.)

> trying to make my site more "google-friendly" so I might get some traffic.

The best way to make your site "google-friendly" is to focus on 
publishing high quality content that people will actually be interested 
in reading.

> Error [64]: "document type does not allow element X here" 
> 
> document type does not allow element "A" here
> 
> These are simple url tags for site map and am not sure what I'm doing wrong
> here - please help?

As Liam mentioned, you missed an </a> end-tag.  However, there is a lot 
of room for improvement in your markup.  In this case, I'd suggest 
remove all the non-breaking spaces (&nbsp;) and mark it up as a list. 
Where some items are indented more than others, use nested lists.

For example, using a few of the items from that page, I recommend 
marking it up like this:

<h1>Index-Home
<ul>
   <li><a href="">Link Directory</a>
     <ul>
       <li><a href="">Link Exchange Information</a>
       <li><a href="">Bikers</a>
         <ul>
           <li><a href="">Biker Links A-E F-Z</a>
           <li><a href="">Clubs</a>
         </ul>
       <li><a href="">Clothes</a>
       <li><a href="">Directories</a>
     </ul>
</ul>

If you don't want the bullets to appear, then use a stylesheet to remove 
them.

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

Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2005 02:53:38 UTC