A complete mystery

boscomilo · #1 May 11th, 2006, 09:03

I can't understand why, but when I run my site through the W3 validator it can't find the doctype and returns the following error

ü/strong>?þ<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD...

Line 1 column 0: character "ÿ" not allowed in prolog.

Yet the code I have written as the doctype is:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Does anyone know why this might happen?

iZone · #2 May 11th, 2006, 09:13

try

<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Legacy_Staff · #3 May 11th, 2006, 15:44

Doesn't it have to be in lower case for xhtml?
(Just guessing, haven't tried yet).

iZone · #4 May 11th, 2006, 16:56

The doctype I suggested came from the W3 site so it must be ok. Let us know if that worked, maybe give us a link if it doesnt so we see if theres anything else wrong.

boscomilo · #5 May 11th, 2006, 17:13

I've tried both suggestions and got the same results.

The url is http://www.usdmanciano.com

It's an Italian football website which I'm about to rebuild for next season. The text is in Italian - would this make a difference?

Also, if I put www.usdmanciano.com into google, it shows the garbled text on the title bar.

When I submitted the site on the critique section of webforumz, a few people just saw garbled pages.

I'm a newcomer to webdesign and was enjoying myself until I started to discover the mysterious world of unicode.

iZone · #6 May 11th, 2006, 18:55

When i go to that url all i get is the source code and its very messed up!! you have some serious issues going on. The only thing i can see is that you have

content="text/html;

in your content-type meta tag when it should end with a ", dont know if that would mess it up.

crazyluv · #7 May 11th, 2006, 19:09

I get the messed up page when I view it in FF 1.5.0.3 but I see the page when I open the link in IE 6.0.29 etc.

I saved the source through IE and viewed the page in FF but everything came out fine so this is one odd problem. Are you using a script or something that might effect ow the page is viewed in certain browsers? Or could it be a server problem?

boscomilo · #8 May 15th, 2006, 10:04

I'm still scatching my head.

When I use the text editor on my FTP site using 3d-FTP I see that the code is corrupted, with some garbled characters at the beginning, then spaces between all of the characters in the code. I have copied and pasted from the notepad onto the HTML text editor on my FTP site and this seems to cure the problem but is only a quick fix solution.

When I upload, I convert to binary as opposed to ASCII, because otherwise I get garbled japanese when I view the site in a browser.
Maybe this is the issue?

When I save my notepad codes as HTML files I have the option to save as Unicode, Unicode big endian, ANSI or UTF-8. I generally leave the default (ANSI) setting. Perhaps I should set it to UTF-8?

I feel like a blind man in a darkened room

crazyluv · #9 May 15th, 2006, 15:52

I am not much help here since I also don't have any idea what it could be but you can try saving it in the different formats as you suggested just to eliminate it as a possibility you can also try uploading the file through the host instead of the FTP to eliminate the possibility of a faulty setting in the FTP. Maybe some one with more experience will come along and turn on the lights for the rest of us.

ukgeoff · #10 May 15th, 2006, 17:02

I've just tried your site in Firefox and it views properly so I don't know if you have changed something.

It was also ok in IE and Opera.

I would note that when run through the W3C validator that it shows 191 errors, so there are certainly a few things that need to be taken care of.

I take it that amongst the things you want to get rid of in the rework is the use of tables as a layout tool and the use of none standard html tags.

boscomilo · #11 May 15th, 2006, 21:44

I have reset everything to UTF-8 and it seems to have done the trick.

I built the site as my first ever HTML project and so it's full of errors, hence the rebuild. Thanks for the help.

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A complete mystery