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In the past, I saved such HTML files in a text editor as text only. When I opened the files again, the warning went away. But I never understood it. Now I have the possibility of an ongoing problem.
How much of an issue is this? If I forget about it, will it be a big deal?
HTML only allows characters in the range of ASCII characters with number 32 to 127. Characters in the range 128 to 255 are not allowed, and must be encoded using &#nnn; where nnn is the number for the symbol. Alternately, you can create an entity in a DTD to encode such characters, but that's got a learning curve to it.
What it is complaining about is you have something like föo, but what you want is föo.
You can run the Character Map program that comes with Windows to find what the encodings of the various characters are.
I can't see any funny characters at all on these pages, but running them through a text only "save" gets rid of the error message. What displays on screen still looks identical but the file size goes down.
The error messages were so constant and disconcerting that I turned off the option to show that particular warning, but I'm concerned that I'm playing with fire.
it might be as simple as the fact that you have a couple of quotation marks in there.
In HomeSite, hit Ctrl-Shift-X to see a list of all the charater entities, and convert all the characters accordingly. :)
But I have a related question. What do people do about an em dash character? & # 1 5 1 ; isn't valid, but & m d a s h ; isn't supported by <drum roll!> Netscape 4 <rim shot!>.
I just use & # 1 5 1 ; and it seems to work out, but I'd love to have a "real" solution.
Well, I actually don't have a good answer to that .. In fact, mdash and ndash are not supported by all browsers (for some dumb reason) .. so I just use #151 and #150 respectively ..
