"No Referer header found!" ?!?

Hi -

Sorry if this issue has been answered before, but searches of your website
and google yielded no helpful results.

I'm trying to include your "XHTML 1.0 valid" icon on a valid webpage that does
pass validation when submitted manually via the validator form URL submit method -
but I get the "No Referer header found!" error show below.

An example webpage that serves ONLY to demonstrate this problem is at :
 
     https://text2car.com/tref.html

I have verified that the http-referer header IS being sent (try clicking on the "Click Me"
link on the above  page to show this) ,  that it DOES validate when submitted manually,
and that  use of https / http protocol is not an issue - this page is ONLY served with
HTTPS, and I type the exact HTTPS URL above into the manual validation form, which works.
I've tried using various modern versions of Firefox on Linux and Firefox & MSIE on Windows
to validate the above page by clicking on the icon with the same error result. Yes, I know the server
SSL certificate for this site is out-of-date - this is on my todo list - but manual validation works
with the existing cert.

When I try changing your validator icon URL to use HTTPS, the connection fails -
the text of the error message seems to imply that you also serve the validator with HTTPS :
  "                                                  ... transferred the referring document
      over a secure protocol such as https but is accessing the validator over
      ordinary non-secure http ..."
but this is not the case, as 
    'https://validator.w3.org/' fails to connect,
which seems to me to be a bug in the error message text.

Could anyone please suggest a way of being able to submit this page by clicking on the validator icon?

Is this a validator bug ? Should I open a bugzilla for it ?

Thanks in advance for any responses, and for providing such an otherwise excellent validation tool,

Regards,
Jason Vas Dias <jason.vas.dias@gmail.com>

The "No Referer header found!" error page text from 
 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https://text2car.com/tref.html
when submited with
 http://validator.w3.org/check/referer :
> Sorry! This document can not be checked.
> No Referer header found!
>
> You have requested we check the referring page, but your browser did not
> send the HTTP "Referer" header field. This can be for several reasons, but
> most commonly it is because your browser does not know about this header,
> has been configured not to send one, transferred the referring document
> over a secure protocol such as https but is accessing the validator over
> ordinary non-secure http, or is behind a proxy or firewall that strips it
> out of the request before it reaches us.
>
> This is not an error in the referring page!
>
> Please use the form interface on the Validator Home Page to check the page
> by URL.

Received on Monday, 13 September 2010 07:56:20 UTC