Custom HTTP Headers?

Carnage · - Joined: 15 Aug 2004 Posts: 2

Is it possible to customize the HTTP headers? The charset parameter appears to be missing, as the w3 validator is spitting out errors:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atomfire.net

TRUSTAbyss · - Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Posts: 3752 Location: USA, GA

if this is dealing with the UTF-8 encoding , thats only in the current beta
release , if your not using this release , you will see errors because Abyss
only supports UTF-8 encoding in the current beta release , Hope that helps!

Carnage · - Joined: 15 Aug 2004 Posts: 2

Actually, the w3 validator was assuming UTF-8 since the charset parameter was missing.

Anyway, I discovered a workaround using META tags:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

The link I posted above now shows successful validation results =)

senshi · - Joined: 05 Nov 2003 Posts: 385 Location: UK

HTML is not a strict language as prople make it out to be.

I regularly write pages which do not contain any header information at all with no impact on the browsers ability to display the page, it is because the that information is 'not required', even a very badly coded HTML page will display the output, regardless of wether the output was correct or not.

If HTML followed the same development track as all other languages, it would be well out of reach from the average joe. Its because HTML is so flexable that people are able with limited knowledge able to build a website.

Personally I would worry more about scripting and making your scripts 100% reliable than stuffing your webpages through a validation system that not many people adhear to.

Stone-D · - Joined: 09 Jan 2004 Posts: 90

senshi · - Joined: 05 Nov 2003 Posts: 385 Location: UK

I know, I took a HTML course at college as a night school thingy, was intresting and informative and made me aware of a few things but in the real world, not many people care about the finer details like correct meta data and ensuring that other items like the characterset is in place, but if you have no time to do that and need to, you can get away with just using a skeleton page, which is simply...

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello!</P>
</body>
</html>

Would also work without errors, thats why its not a strict language, if it was, then you would find that the browser would throw errors all over the place. Something I was told whilst on the course as well, you really only need to be concerned with referencing and indexing your site and making sure that your meta data is relavent to your web site is only inserted into the index page of your site, all links from theirin should be relative to your site and all pages in the site have no meta data keywords inserted, the keyword meta data is often abused and people put any keyword they can think of.

getting your scripts 100% is more important because your scripts will cause your site to come crashing down if you dont have them running 100% error free. The language is a higher level language and is more strict and if you dont adhear to the rules you can not expect the script to function.

HTML on the otherhand was designed to work regardless of any scripting errors, its more important to get the data across even if theirs errors in the script because it is more readable than a scripting language, a scripting language differs and is bound by strict rules inorder to function.