Help with BAN SIGN - html [Archive]

kirsten

07-30-2010, 11:49 AM

Hi,
Im getting this strange sign when browsing:

Page code in Firefox looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>

What did I do wrong in DOCTYPE, any suggestions?:mad:

Thanks!

djr33

07-30-2010, 01:43 PM

It sounds like a character encoding problem. This is not from the doctype. You might be able to fix this by specifying an encoding in a meta tag.

For example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

That's for unicode (UTF8). You might need another encoding... you didn't post enough information for anyone to know that, though.

Most importantly, just make sure that all of your pages use the same encoding. Usually UTF8 is best for any pages that have unusual (non-English) characters, but then it must still be consistent in every aspect: such as the document encoding for the .htm text file, in addition to the html markup, or for example also in a database if you are getting information from a database. And make sure your html editor (program) is compatible with the format and using the same format as you specify in the html. If even one piece is different, you will get weird characters. Also, for this reason, just cutting and pasting can sometimes generate weird characters, so be careful about that.