UK pound sign causing page not to validate?

[T.J.]

Whilst testing my page for validating I kept getting the following
error message;

"Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 124
it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8
(in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in
the specified Character Encoding).
Please check both the content of the file and the
character encoding indication."

I finally tracked it down to using the UK pound sign,
here are 2 test pages
1, has no pound signs (and validates)
2, has 1 pound sign in it (and creates the error)
http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test1.html
http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test2.html

How can I use the pound sign and get the page to validate?
TIA.

 

[Mark Parnell]

Sometime around Tue, 11 Nov 2003 23:24:40 -0000, T.J. is reported to have
stated:

2, has 1 pound sign in it (and creates the error)
http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test2.html

It has a black diamond with a question mark in it here.

How can I use the pound sign and get the page to validate?

£ or £

Can't comment on browser support, though others may be able to.

 

[T.J.]

Sometime around Tue, 11 Nov 2003 23:24:40 -0000, T.J. is reported to have
stated:


It has a black diamond with a question mark in it here.


£ or £

Can't comment on browser support, though others may be able to.

Many thanks,
£ did the trick.
Is there a list of numbers for symbols anywhere? as my
character map says to use the pound keystroke to display the
pound symbol.
Also is £ compatible with all browsers?

 

[Mark Parnell]

Sometime around Wed, 12 Nov 2003 00:04:24 -0000, T.J. is reported to have
stated:

Many thanks,
£ did the trick.
Is there a list of numbers for symbols anywhere? as my
character map says to use the pound keystroke to display the
pound symbol.

http://www1.tip.nl/~t876506/EntitiesXHTML1.html has the numerical, unicode
and name references (though you need to add the & and ; to the names).

Also is £ compatible with all browsers?

As I said before, I can't comment. Works here on IE6 and Mozilla. I imagine
it would at least partly depend on the font, too.

 

[Leslie]

Many thanks,
£ did the trick.
Is there a list of numbers for symbols anywhere? as my
character map says to use the pound keystroke to display the
pound symbol.
Also is £ compatible with all browsers?

Here is a Simple Character Entity Chart with browser support info:

http://www.fjordaan.uklinux.net/entities/entities_support.html

Leslie

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

£ did the trick.

So would the pound sign itself have done, if you had entered it in the
advertized encoding, UTF-8. Why are you declaring UTF-8 if your editor is
incapable of saving data in UTF-8 format? I know there can be some reasons,
but I cannot see any in this case, especially since you aren't even using
any characters beyond the ISO-8859-1 repertoire, such as dashes or the real
inch symbol (double prime).

Is there a list of numbers for symbols anywhere? as my
character map says to use the pound keystroke to display the
pound symbol.

The character references are defined as referring to ISO 10646 code
positions, which are equivalent to Unicode code positions. So it's a moving
target. For hunting down the numbers, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/unicode.html

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Here is a Simple Character Entity Chart with browser support info:

http://www.fjordaan.uklinux.net/entities/entities_support.html

It's an interesting effort but somewhat difficult to use, somewhat dated
(2002), and most importantly incorrect in the sense that support in the most
widely used browser, IE on Windows, is described wrong. What it says about
IE reflects mostly the font in use.

My IE 6, for example, shows all the characters correctly, when a
sufficiently rich font (such as Arial Unicode MS) is used. The page tries to
prevent this by specifying font-family, with Arial as the first candidate,
and Arial is known to lack many of the characters considered. I can override
that using the "Accessibility" settings of IE, or a user style sheet, but
I'm afraid that most people don't know how to do such things. But whenever
their browser is set - in the browser settings, or by a Web page - to use a
different font, the see different behavior in character support.

(This is too bad, so I won't comment on the incorrect terminology, which is
even more confusing than W3C's incorrect terminology. But see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/ref.html )

 

[T.J.]

So would the pound sign itself have done, if you had entered it in the
advertized encoding, UTF-8. Why are you declaring UTF-8 if your editor is
incapable of saving data in UTF-8 format? I know there can be some reasons,
but I cannot see any in this case, especially since you aren't even using
any characters beyond the ISO-8859-1 repertoire, such as dashes or the real
inch symbol (double prime).

Thank you for the reply,
Sorry, I am pretty new to html and coding and all this talk
of UTF, ISO and Unicode is a bit beyond me. I am trying to
learn as I go along.
I originaly had dashes instead of inches, but that was what I
thought was causing the problem, so changed them all to inches.
I obviously still got error messages when trying to validate, then
discovered it was the pound sign.
I will have a look at yor link as soon as I get time, does it
provide the character refferance for the dashes?
Again, many thanks to all who have replied

 

[C A Upsdell]

Many thanks,
£ did the trick.
Is there a list of numbers for symbols anywhere? as my
character map says to use the pound keystroke to display the
pound symbol.
Also is £ compatible with all browsers?

See http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/res_entities.htm

 

[Andreas Prilop]

http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test1.html
http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test2.html

Please note that
250Kg should read 250 kg
with small "k" and [no-break] space.
Likewise, it is "800 mm" etc.

http://www.bipm.org/en/si/
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/rules.html

 

[T.J.]

http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test1.html
http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/test2.html

Please note that
250Kg should read 250 kg
with small "k" and [no-break] space.
Likewise, it is "800 mm" etc.

Thank you all,
I have now got the page validating using pound symbol
and the correct inch symbol, when uploading to my test
site.
However as soon as I put it on my proper site, my host
(easyspace) adds some code that stops it validating.
Is this something which should concern me? I have had no
other problems with easyspace, and would like to stick
with them.
The page is at;
http://www.sim64.freeserve.co.uk/standard-ramps.html
and
http://www.wheelchair-ramps.co.uk/standard-ramps.html
Any other comments would be appreciated (apart from the
obvious about the SEO in the Alt attributes)