Parsing problems
These problems are due to basic formatting issues:
| E001 | There is either a > missing or you may have used < instead of < in the content | A > character was expected but was not found. Sometimes this error appears when you have mismatched quotes, but more often it is caused by using a < character in the text. The < character should only be used to start a new tag. Within text you should use the character reference < instead. |
| E002 | There is either a < missing or you may have used > instead of > in the content | A < character was expected but was not found. Sometimes this error appears when you have mismatched quotes, but more often it is caused by using a > character in the text. The > character should only be used to end a tag. Within text you should use the character reference > instead. |
| E003 | There is either an extra < or you may have used < instead of < in the content | A < character was found in an unexpected place. This is often caused by using a < character in the text. The < character should only be used to start a new tag. Within text you should use the character reference < instead. |
| E004 | There is either an extra > or you may have used > instead of > in the content | A > character was found in an unexpected place. This is often caused by using a > character in the text. The > character should only be used to end a tag. Within text you should use the character reference > instead. |
| E005 | Extra quote character found or quote character missing | There is either an unnecessary extra single or double quote character or there is a missing quote. This may be caused by putting single or double quote characters within quoted text e.g. "Mary said "hello" to her friends". In this case you should replace the quote character with the character reference equivalent, e.g. "Mary said "hello" to her friends". Note that this error may cause several others to appear that can all be fixed by correcting this issue. See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.2 (displayed in new window). |
| E006 | The attribute's value is missing | It appears that you have specified an attribute name but not supplied the attribute's value. If the value does appear to be present then this error may have been be caused by a misformatted tag possibly with single or double quotes in the wrong place or even mismatched. |
| E007 | Found '&'. You should use '&' instead | You should not use the & character within attribute values as this may be confused with the start of character references. This error may also appear if you used a character reference but did not terminate it with a semicolon. Only the first problem in the attribute will be marked, so look out for others. |
| E008 | Found invalid character reference | A character entity reference was found in an attribute that is not defined as part of the HTML specification being validated against. This error may be caused by using an & character when no character reference was intended, in which case use '&' instead. It may also be caused by specifying an invalid numeric reference containing non-numeric characters. |
| E009 | Invalid characters found in attribute's value. Consider putting the value within quotes | It is good practice to always put quotes around an attribute's value. But if you do not use quotes then you are only allowed to use the characters (a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9), hyphen (ASCII decimal 45), period (ASCII decimal 46), underscore (ASCII decimal 95), and colon (ASCII decimal 58). See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.2 (displayed in new window). |
| E010 | Unrecognised or malformed <!DOCTYPE> tag (if "auto-detecting" then a best-fit <!DOCTYPE> will be used) | Common reasons for this error are a misspelt declaration, the wrong case used (the declaration is case-sensitive), or an incomplete declaration. You can find a list of the <!DOCTYPE> " recognises here. |
| E011 | Found '&' within content without a terminating ';' | You should not use the & character within content as this may be confused with the start of character references. You should use '&' instead. |
| E012 | Found invalid character reference | A character entity reference was found that is not defined as part of the HTML specification being validated against. This error may be caused by using an & character when no character reference was intended, in which case use '&' instead. It may also be caused by specifying an invalid numeric reference containing non-numeric characters. |
| E013 | Found UTF-8 BOM at start of document. This should be removed | The web page starts with a UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM). Some user agents may display the three characters at the top of the page unless you remove this.Various utilities exist that can be used to remove the BOM such as http://okapi.sourceforge.net/Release/Utilities/Help/bomconversion.htm (displayed in new window). |
| E014 | Found '&' within content without a terminating ';' | This error typically appears if you used a character reference but did not terminate it with a semicolon. |
| E015 | Found 'X' within character entity reference | This error appears if you used a hexadecimal entity reference with a capital 'X'. In XHTML you must use a lowercase 'x'. See http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.12 (displayed in new window). |
| E020 | No matching start tag found | There are two common causes of this error. Either you have forgotten the start tag, or you may have tags that are improperly nested e.g. <b><i></b></i> |
| E021 | Empty tag | This error may be caused by inadvertently using < and > characters together in the text rather than representing these characters using < and > instead |
| E022 | Attributes are not allowed in end tags | End tags cannot have attributes. You may have inadvertently added a '/' character at the beginning of a tag by mistake. |
| E023 | An attribute name is missing | It appears that you have specified an attribute value but not supplied the attribute's name. This tends to indicate a misformatted tag possibly with single or double quotes in the wrong place or mismatched. Check that there are no extra or missing quote characters. |
| E024 | Extra '/' character found within tag | A '/' character was found at the start of a tag and at the end of a tag. One of the two '/' characters should be removed. |
| E030 | Unrecognised reserved name - possibly an invalid conditional comment | Most browsers can cope with invalid tags but some robots may not. So it pays to use valid tags to ensure your site is indexed properly. In this case you may be using a Microsoft 'downlevel-revealed conditional comment'. If so, try converting this to a 'downlevel-hidden conditional comment' by hiding it within a <!-- comment --> |
| E031 | Found BOM at start of document that conflicts with the 'content-type' HTTP header | The web page starts with a Byte Order Mark (BOM) that is different to the character encoding specified in the 'content-type' HTTP header. The HTTP header information always takes precedence and this may cause the entire document to be full of errors." |
| W001 | There should not be any white space at the start or end of an attribute's value | There should not be any white space at the start or end of an attribute's value. This is a minor issue and can probably be ignored. See here (displayed in new window) for more info. |
| W002 | There appears to be a badly formed comment on this line (only start of comment shown). Comments must start with "<!--" | Most browsers can cope with badly formed comments but some robots may not. So it pays to define comments correctly to ensure your site is indexed properly. The definition of a valid comment in HTML may be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4 (displayed in new window). |
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