Re: ⅓ ERROR on w3c validator.

On Fri, Feb 3, 2017 at 11:35 PM, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote:

Can't find &frac13 in https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/dtd_module_
> defs.html#a_module_XHTML_Special_Characters,


Yes, that explains the error messages.

The issue was indeed reported by Eric Richards a few times in 2014, first as
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2014Aug/0009.html
but without specifying the DOCTYPE or URL. It’s still a pity that there was
no answer then,
but it would have been the same as today.

To put it more explicitly, the &frac13; entity (and many other similar
entities) is not defined in any HTML specification prior to HTML. Thus, if
you have used it, your options are:

1) Ignore the messages. This is not a good option, since you could easily
miss real errors caused by typos in entity names.

2) Use numeric character references instead, such as &#x2153;.

3) Use the vulgar fraction characters themselves, such as ⅓ (using the
UTF-8 encoding for your HTML document, which is a good idea anyway). This
may cause some problems in your authoring tools.

4) Validate against HTML5. You would start from changing the DOCTYPE string
to simply <!DOCTYPE html>. Beware that there are things that are valid in
previous versions of HTML but reported as errors by the W3C Markup
Validator when testing against HTML5. It’s impossible to say how serious
the transition problems would be, as they greatly depend.

Yucca

P.S. You might be interested in the *practical* issues with such vulgar
fraction characters, namely font problems, see e.g.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23396342/html-ascii-not-showing-on-ie-8-9

Received on Tuesday, 7 February 2017 17:12:12 UTC