[Sussex] Strange error when checking html with W3C validate

[John D.]

Ronan Chilvers wrote:
>On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:54:45 +0100
>"Gareth Ablett" <Gareth.Ablett at itpserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
><snip>
>  
>>I may be wrong on certain parts here but this is what I do;
>>The DOCTYPE is always the first line so swap the xml and the DOCTYPE
>>around, also I hope those excessive *'s are part of the validators
>>display.
>>    
>
>To be valid XHTML, the xml declaration needs to come first as far as
>I know.
>
>  
>>I gather you use the validator in the way to upload the file your best
>>bet is to upload the file to some webspace and use the link to
>>validate the page that way regardless of the browser it should get
>>the same result.
>>    
>
>Good plan - would be a good way of pinning it down to a browser issue
>rather than the code itself.
Well I seem to be making a bit of a "pigs ear" of this at the moment. 
Because taking your hint, I decided to upload it to my service provider 
(34sp.com), which at the moment, it can't manage to do! but
somewhere along the line, I seem to have managed to delete the whole file.

So I've had to start from scratch. Apart from the actual content (which 
is just text and a javascript e-mail contact) the headers, DTD and xml 
declaration are exactly the same. I'm still using quanta to produce this.

As previously mentioned, I like to check for standards compliance, and 
believe it or not, I'm now getting it all validated irrespective of 
whether I check it with Opera, firefox or konqueror and I haven't got 
the faintest idea why.

The only presumption that I can make, is that if, as Geoff pointed out, 
that Prolog is a programming language, and that the error seemed to be 
concerning "Line 1, Column 0" then there had to have either been some 
sort of additional or missing hidden character that was connected in 
someway to the encoding.

I did find the encoding selection "thingy" in quanta and it was set to 
UTF-8.

I suspect that all I have to do now too see if there is any other 
possible problems with the code, is to change the permissions on the web 
server! then it won't keep bouncing the ftp transaction with a 
"permission denied"!

regards

John D.

p.s. Oh and no, I've got no idea why I was getting the "line 1, column 
0" error in opera and konqueror, but not firefox. I suppose it could 
still have been a browser issue i.e. I was thinking along the lines of 
opera reputably being the most standards compliant - maybe konqueror is 
pretty close behind???