Validation warnings on W3C mobileOK Checker

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1

Hi,

I am developing a mobile website and trying to validate it on W3C mobileOK Checker: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/.

I got a score of 100% and it says “The page is mobileOK!”; though, there are some warnings in the “Detailed Report section”. I cannot link to the actual page since this is a special project but here is the code I use in the beginning of the HTML codument:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
	<title>Title</title>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml;charset=UTF-8" />
	<meta http-equiv="Cache-control" content="max-age=300" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1" />
	<meta name="handheldfriendly" content="true"/>
	<meta name="description" content="" />
	<meta name="keywords" content="" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css" charset="UTF-8" />
</head>

and I have the following at the beginning of my style.css file.

@charset "UTF-8";

Below is a list of warnings that I couldn’t get rid of.

  • The document’s caching information is not provided in the HTTP headers
  • A matching HTTP response header does not exist for the meta http-equiv element
  • An HTTP response header that matches the meta http-equiv element exists but their values differ
  • The resource does not specify UTF-8 as character encoding
  • The linked resource character encoding may not be appropriate for mobile devices
  • The document is not served as “application/xhtml+xml”

Do you any have idea about how to get rid of these warnings?

2

To me it mainly sounds like your server isn’t optimised and since ‘XHTML Basic’ is supposed to be served as “application/xhtml+xml”. Like I have on this ancient beta http://www.xhtmlcoder.com/beck/ (for browsers that accept and the markup validator) but I didn’t design it for mobile conformance.

Your META is basically redundant for encoding for browsers supporting the recommended XHTML “application/xhtml+xml” MIME I suspect that is what some of the warning problems are. It should be done at server level the: <meta http-equiv=“Content-type” content=“application/xhtml+xml;charset=UTF-8” /> is meaningless to an XML Processor, and won’t make your page magically served as XHTML.

It will still remain ‘text/html’ and be parsed by legacy browsers and won’t halt on FATAL errors such as failing well-formedness.

This might help: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-declarations basically you might want to use something like PHP to do content negotiation or set the HTTP headers, etc.

Note: a live site would be needed to see those errors you have listed via the mobileOK anyway since they concern both HTTP and your CSS, etc.

3

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your reply. I am testing this on a shared hosting. What do you mean by “your server isn’t optimised”? How do I set set the HTTP headers? By the way, I am not sure if I need the XML declaration or not (<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>), but when I add it, it eliminates one error.

4

I think adding

# Enable the mod_expires module
ExpiresActive On
# Set expiration date to 1 month for all style sheets and images
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
# Set expiration date to 1 week for all HTML pages
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 1 week"

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

AddCharset UTF-8 .css

to your .htaccess file will solve your caching information warning and your character encoding problems (assuming you are using UTF-8, of course :slight_smile: ).

You might also find RedBot useful for seeing what’s happening.

5

I was checking that .htaccess solutions but since not all the websites are hosted on Apache, I need to find another solution. This will be a template and I have no control over on which servers people will use it.

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