Re: Validator errors

Martin Farrimond (martinf@farrimond.me.uk) wrote:

>
> I have an embedded and displayed "W3C XHTML 1.0" badge on every page on
> my website (bristolnomads.org.uk). Whatever page I have loaded in my
> browser from that website, when I click the badge - which should run the
> validator on that page - the checker always checks the webroot file -
> index.htm.


The reason is that nowadays the default policy is that the HTTP header
Referer contains just the domain pari (“origin”) of the address. When the
validator gets a request with uri=referer, it will use the address in the
Referer header and therefore indeed always checks just the main page of the
site. Thus, the validator FAQ item on this issue at
https://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-referer
is essentially outdated; the uri=referer thing just does not work any more
(unless you tweak your server to specify a different referrer policy).

You could replace uri=referer by uri= followed by the specific URL of the
page, but this gets clumsy of course.


> Ok, so I can paste the actual url of the page I want to test into the Nu
> HTML checker, but that makes having the badge on the web page useless
> and confusing.
>

Well, those badges have always been (worse than) useless and confusing—to
visitors at least.

When you are visiting a page and you wish to validate it, simply cut and
paste the page URL from the browsers URL bar into the validator of your
choice.

Yucca