Is it just me? Or has the W3 Validator lost its mind?
Just finished performing a routine validation on a page and got a strange, scary error message:
Unable to Determine Parse Mode!
It just gets worse from there. Apparently it isn’t detecting the HTML 4.01 Strict doctype I use, or maybe it isn’t detecting anything at all. I checked it, even recopied the doctype from HTML Help, and revalidated, to no avail. I then checked Paul’s site, which got the same error. Paul and I both got the same subsequent error message:
Line 1, Column 1: end of document in prolog
This error may appear when the validator receives an empty document. Please make sure that the document you are uploading is not empty, and report any discrepancy.
Even Jeffrey Zeldman’s ALA article about DOCTYPES gets the same error messages. 
I’m sure the W3 site just went :wacko: temporarily, unless someone changed the Strict doctype on us in the last 24 hours… Either way, you might consider using another validator until the W3 gets its ducks (or doctypes) in a row.
