HTML 4.01 Strict not parsing

**dotancohen** · Mar 16, 2007 09:44

On http://dotancohen.com the pages aren't passing validation because of an apparent error in my content-type meta tag. I can't figure it out for the life of me. Does anybody see anything wrong with this code?

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Dotan Cohen</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta name="keywords" content="dotan, cohen, israel, haifa, medic, golani, 51, terriblefile, terriblereferrer" />
    <meta name="description" content="If youre looking for Dotan Cohen, here I am. Dotan Cohens homepage." />
    <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/eng/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

</head>
<body>

....rest of page....

**RetroNetro** · Mar 16, 2007 09:49

The problem is the /> at the end of the meta tags make it just > and it should validate.

**AutisticCuckoo** · Mar 16, 2007 11:00

The NET syntax is not allowed in HTML, but HTML has SHORTTAG YES in the SGML declaration, which means that the '/' character terminates the tag. That leaves the '>' character hanging, as character data. In other words, <meta/> is equivalent to <meta>&gt;.

Character data is not allowed in the HEAD element, which is why the validator complains.

The only reason most purported XHTML documents don't show sprinkled '>' characters all over is because virtually all browsers have buggy parsers that simply ignore the '/' when parsing HTML.

In real XHTML (served as XML), it's very different, of course.

**dotancohen** · Mar 17, 2007 01:43

Actually, the page was recently converted from XHTML. After reading some faqs here on sitepoint, I converted it to HTML 4.01. But I was getting the same parsing error on the page when it was XHTML as well.

Also, the other meta tags don't throw the error.

User Tag List

Thread: HTML 4.01 Strict not parsing

Thread Tools

Display

HTML 4.01 Strict not parsing

Bookmarks

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions