yoderfarms - 1:33 pm on Nov 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Other things to check: 1. Is your html creating a problem? Check with the online W3C Validator for HTML

this is what i got when i entered the url for the main page

No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8. I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents. Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document. Sorry! This document can not be checked. Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 14, 28, 50 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication.

like i said its a yahoo! store

i suspect some of the spaces may actually be the ALT+255 whitespace character but I don't recall using it here. Additionally, that should still be a part of UTF-8, right? Is there any way to search for non UTF-8 characters in a document?

when it specifes likes 14,28, and 50 is it referring to the actual lines in the file when i open it in notepad or does it have a different mehod of specifying line numbers? when i did a "view source" here's what these lines had i'll put them in context and explain the code..

first error is on line 14:

13:"<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">" 14:"<!-- " 15:if (top!= self) top.location.replace(self.location); 16:// --> 17:</SCRIPT>

explanation:

in yahoo stores, if you want to create a menu bar across the site, there is a variables dialog where you can speficy tags for the head element .. sometimes frames are used to simulate the menubar when needed and the URL doesn't need to be bookmarked. however sometimes the real menubar gets stuck within the frams simulation, leaving two menubars across the top! ....this piece of code is used to break out of the extra frame and use the regular integrated non-frames menubar.

second error is on line 28:

19:<table width = "100%" bgcolor=#FFFFFF border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0> 20:<tr><th> </th></tr> 21:<tr> 22:<th><img src="http://site.example.com/SFM-Logo-23:orange_blue.jpg"></img></th> 24:</tr> 25:<tr>144 26:<th><font face="arial" size=-1"> 27:<a href="http://www.example.com/">Store Home</a> 28: ¦ 29:<a href="http://forum.example.com/">Message Forum</a> 30: ¦ 31: <a href="http://site.example.com/">Fitness Calculators</a> 32: ¦ 33: <a href="mailto:service@example.com">Email us</a></font></th> 34: </tr> 35: <tr><th> </th></tr> 36: </table>

explanation:
this part is the universal head element that draws the menubar across the top of the store for navigation between the store, various perl-based fitness calculators, and allows an easy to spot contact link.

third error is on line 50:

42:<ul> 43:<li><a href="http://www.example.com/axhd.html">Some text</a></li> 44:<li><a href="http://www.example.com/axstimx.html">Some text</a></li> 45:<li><a href="http://www.example.com/dsrbreload.html">Some text</a></li> 46:<li><a href="http://www.example.com/nutvitrix.html">Some text</a></li> 47:<li><a href="http://www.example.com/santight.html">Some text</a></li> 48:<li><a href="http://www.examplet.com/gnnovxt.html">Some text</a></li> 49:<li><a href="http://www.example.com/tlebol.html">Some text</a></li> 50:</ul> 51:<font face ="arial narrow" size=3><i><B>11/09/2006: New Products 52:arriving in 1-2 days!</b></i></font> 53:<ul> 54:<li>Some text</li> 55:<li>Some text</li> 56:<li>Some text</li> 57:<li>Some text</li> 59:<li>Some text</li> 60:<li>Some text</li> 61:<li>Some text</li> 62:</ul>

explanation:

this is just two bulleted lists from the top of the front page. i can't understand where there would be non UTF-8 characters.

in any case, can someone tell me what this means, what characters are allowable for UTF-8, and how to fix it?

I used the default settings.. .. perhaps i should fix the character set to us-ascii but wht of doc type? the yahoo generated page says :

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

but perhaps some of the code i inserted is deprecated or non compliant because i learned html in 1996 and don't always use the newest methods of editing. it didn't used to be this darned complicated!

[edited by: tedster at 3:29 pm (utc) on Nov. 22, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com, remove specifics [/edit]