inconsistent XHTML validation

I am working on an assignment for an XHTML class I am taking.

I used the validator to check my first project after I had uploaded it to the server at school:
http://web.gccaz.edu/~bamabee/cis166aa/project01.htm

It validated perfectly.

Following my teacher's instructions, for my second assignment I modified the source file (but NOT the first three lines or the <html> tag), and tried to validate with the file upload service.  The validator listed one error and two warnings:

  1..  No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.

  None of the standards sources gave any information on the character encoding labeling for this document. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. As a fallback solution, the "UTF-8" encoding was used to read the content and attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents. 

  Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document.

  2..  Unable to Determine Parse Mode!

  The validator can process documents either as XML (for document types such as XHTML, SVG, etc.) or SGML (for HTML 4.01 and prior versions). For this document, the information available was not sufficient to determine the parsing mode unambiguously, because:

    a.. the MIME Media Type (text/html) can be used for XML or SGML document types 
    b.. No known Document Type could be detected 
    c.. No XML declaration (e.g <?xml version="1.0"?>) could be found at the beginning of the document. 
    d.. No XML namespace (e.g <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">) could be found at the root of the document. 
  As a default, the validator is falling back to SGML mode.

Validation Output: 1 Error 
  1..  Line 1, Column 0: end of document in prolog. 
I spent TWO HOURS trying all the fixes suggested in your documentation, cutting and pasting to be sure my code had no typos.  Nothing worked.  (FYI, I don't care if this works with IE 6, for the purposes of my assignment, I only need it to work with IE 7 and Firefox 2.)

This seemed very odd to me, so I tried to revalidate my original file via the file upload, and lo and behold, it produced the same error messages.  It still validates if I point it at the URL on the school server.  The contents of these two files is IDENTICAL.

I can only conclude that the file upload service is not working properly.

I didn't find a previous report of this exact problem, although I admit I ran out of patience and didn't make it through all the reports in the system (remember, I'd already wasted 2 hours on trying to fix a non-existent problem).

Just wanted to let you know....

Thanks.

Beth Mabee

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Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2008 08:22:52 UTC