Validating Xara created site gives character encoding errors

[Egg Bramhill]

Xara declares sites to be:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252"/>

character encoded.

However testing sites via W3.orgs online mobile validator gives 3 medium warnings. The first regarding caching information I can remove by use of the .htaccess file but the other two medium warnings relate to character encoding and I have issues with these.

#1.

The HTTP Content-Type header does not specify a character encoding and no UTF-8 encoding or a non-UTF-8 is specified in the XML declaration

and
#2.

The HTTP Content-Type header does not specify a character encoding but it specifies an Internet media type starting with "text/" and there is no meta element with http-equiv attribute that specifies UTF-8 character encoding

I can remove #2 by placing

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

in the head section of the site but this would seem to conflict with Xara's declared character set.

I don't know of any way to remove #1

You can view the problem by placing http://www.parkeston.com/character_encoding/index.htm into w3.org's validator http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

Anyone have any enlightenment?

Egg

[covoxer]

Hi Egg.

You can replace charset declaration as explained in feature 9 here: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...anced-features

You still get #1 probably because the encoding meta element is not the first element in the head section. You can only change this by editing exported file. But you can ignore it. This warning means that if there is some other elements prior to this one, that contain encoding sensitive content, it may not be interpreted correctly. This is not the case for Xara generated page however. All the elements prior to encoding meta are either not encoding sensitive or irrelevant for browsers. So all the content that does rely on declared encoding is safely placed after it's declaration.

The W3C mobileOK Checker is relatively simple set of rules of thumb that make sure your content is safe for most mobile browsers. However, since it lacks any intellect, it can not actually make a correct decision if any of these rules is redundant for a particular page code. So it takes a safe side by overkill recommendations just to not miss anything that might be dangerous in some cases. And that's why these encoding warnings have a "medium" severity.

My suggestion is to simply ignore them.

[Egg Bramhill]

Cheers John, thank you for taking the time to look at this. I've followed the tweak in the undocumented page as well as changing the .htaccess file to remove the caching error and as you say this still leaves #1. I know these validators are a catch-all answer and some are often outdated before they're even released, for example W3C still gives a severe warning if it finds any java script yet most mobile browsers can handle JS quite well now.

[Cloud]

I would never trust these validators which in some cases don't even validate their own sites. For example type in any of the big websites and sometimes hundreds of errors come up. I often get clients (the ones who think they know a bit about the internet) saying that the site we have designed for them isn't W3C compliant and we then point out that neither is facebook, or twitter, or ebay or even google. For instance ebay.co.uk has 430 errors and 28 warnings. Ignore them. I use google webmaster tools to check the site, for obvious reasons.

[Egg Bramhill]

In the main I'd agree with you but they are tools worth using. For example the caching warning is very relevant to speeding up delivery of your site, mobile or otherwise. They indicate a standard to which we should all endeavour to achieve within limitations and total disregard of them is as stupid as strict adherence. I never aim at W3C compliance, but do try to avoid unnecessary errors.

[Cloud]

Of course we should all aim at good web standards but my response is to the half-experts who demand that their site is fully wrc compliant. On another note a great tool I use for speeding up my site is pingdom ( http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ ) this can help a lot to speed things up, with details of which elements are slowing the site down.