ITS Tech Tips : Misc Tips

When you go to validate one of your web pages, are you getting a message like this one?

If you've copied and pasted text from say a Word document into your web page, the ascii characters are what get pasted over, not HTML code. In HTML, certain characters such as the ampersand and quotes cannot be simply typed in, they need a special code for them. The web page validator will let you know what lines these characters are on so you can go in and fix them. You can also tell where they are at if you open the page using Internet Explorer because those characters will read funny - check out the picture below.

In all three cases above, an apostrophe had been pasted over from another document and just needed to be retyped in the web editor; no special code was needed.

Page last updated 08/14/06. Send questions or comments to ITS Training.