RE: Doesn't validate online, but pasted View Source does

-----Original Message-----
From: Jukka K. Korpela [mailto:jkorpela@cs.tut.fi] 
Sent: 13 December 2007 12:51
To: mark@markrae.co.uk; www-validator@w3.org
Subject: Re: Doesn't validate online, but pasted View Source does

Jukka,

Firstly, thank you very much for the reply - I appreciate it.

>> Can anyone please tell me why the following site:
>> http://www.contracting-online.com doesn't validate 100%
>
> It validates. Did you do something special when you tried? Like some 
> special settings in the interface.

Nope - all I did was this:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http://www.contracting-online.co
m/home/default.aspx

> That's a different issue. The server probably sends different responses 
> to different user agents. (For example, Google search robot probably 
> gets essentially the same response as the validator.)

I see.

> When I visit the address on IE 7, with scripting enabled (even though I 
> know that the claim about JavaScript being safe is not true) 

:-)

> and then 
> click on the button that claims "W3C XHTML 1.0" conformance, then indeed 
> I get the analysis you describe, but that's really for the page
> http://www.contracting-online.com/home/default.aspx
> and that page, as served to the validator, does _not_ contain a <meta> 
> tag specifying the encoding. Check "Show Source" and then "Revalidate", 
> and you'll see a surprise.

Interesting... When I go to
http://www.contracting-online.com/home/default.aspx and do a View Source, I
most certainly _do_ see the <meta> tag... Is it normal for the validator to
ignore the <meta> tag? Or maybe I have not written it correctly...?

> The problem is probably that the site _heavily_ relies on both 
> client-side scripting and cookies and does not really work at all 
> without them. As one minor symptom, you cannot validate the real pages 
> (those that you want users to see) in a direct way. But if you copy and 
> paste, things are quite different.

I didn't know that. I maintain loads of sites, and they all validate 100%
except this one... Not sure what to try next, so would be very grateful for
any suggestions...

Thanks again for the reply.

Mark

Received on Thursday, 13 December 2007 13:13:36 UTC