Posted by garbetjie 6 weeks 3 days ago
I'm having a strange issue when it comes to the viewing of my mobile site through my browser, as well as when trying to validate it. I have a feeling the two issues could be related.
I've never encountered this issue before, as I have always just defaulted to using XHTML MP 1.0, which seems to work fine (1.1 works fine too).
However, as soon as I move to 1.2, Firefox tells me that there is an undefined entity parsing error - on "©". Which sounds very strange to me, as it works 100% on the other two profiles.
Validators
I've run the mobile site through both the mobiReady validator, as well as the W3C validator.
The mobiReady validator says that everything is 100%, whereas the W3C validator says that there is an input error in one of the Document Type Definition ".mod" files. It seems like this might be causing other errors, which is causing Firefox to not define some entities.
But I'm not 100% on this - I don't have experience in the DTD field. Has anyone else come across this issue when testing?
For the record, this is my opening document declaration:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN" "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
I am running Firefox 3.6.7, with the XHTML Mobile Profile Firefox plugin. I've also attached a screen shot of the W3C validator, hoping it will make sense to at least one person :)
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| validator.w3.org-check.png | 73.62 KB |
Posted by ruadhan 6 weeks ago
Mobile Champion
Sounds a lot like a similar problem that we came across a while back with the XHTML MP 1.1 DTD. Didn't notice it with the 1.2 DTD before though...
It was to do with the non UTF-8 quotation marks in the legal section of the DTD. See link below for more details
http://mobiforge.com/testing/blog/caveat-validator-or-dtd-anyone
Ruadhan O'DonoghuedotMobi
Posted by mattan 6 weeks ago
Are you using
©to insert the ©?Posted by garbetjie 6 weeks ago
Ah, great, thanks.
I did find another post in the forums about it too. However, that didn't specifically mention MP 1.2. I love how the comments on your blog mention that they pointed it out to the OMA 2 years ago - and we're still having the same issue today.
*sigh*
Considering they haven't updated it in the past two years, I presume it's safe to use the modified version you supplied?
If I might be so bold as to ask, do you use the modified version you supplied?
Posted by ruadhan 6 weeks ago
Mobile Champion
Yes, we use the modified version - we have to use a local copy anyway (or we'd be hitting their server too often) and the validation was just failing all the time if we didn't make the change to it.
So it's *probably* safe to use!
Ruadhan O'DonoghuedotMobi
Posted by garbetjie 6 weeks ago
Ah, I see. I'm assuming that the only change I would need to make would be the referencing of the DTD URL?
For example, instead of inserting
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN" "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">I would insert
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN" "http://my/url/here/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">Correct?
Posted by garbetjie 6 weeks ago
Sorry, mattan. I only saw this now. Yeah, I'm using © to insert.
Posted by ruadhan 6 weeks ago
Mobile Champion
I think that, yes, technically that should work, but I don't know if I'd recommend it. We were coming from a different direction wrt to the validator in ready.mobi. Ready.mobi fetches a document at a URL, and then once it recogises the DOCTYPE, it uses the local copy of the DTD to validate - and we had rectified the problem in our local DTD copy. So we could validate any pages easily, without having to ever actually change the DOCTYPE in any public webpages.
I think if you are using your own systemID in the DOCTYPE of your pages, then the new URL your specify should always be available, and anyone wishing to validate your pages should be able to get a copy of it as needed.
I've just been investigating a little...
As an example, the mobile version of this site, mobiforge.mobi contains an © entity in the footer. Because of it, it also fails on the W3C validation service at http://validator.w3.org
However, if you validate against the W3C mobile page checker at http://validator.w3.org/mobile (which is an completely independent service) it passes, despite using the same DOCTYPE in the page. The W3C mobile page checker also uses it's own local DTDs, without the non UTF8 characters
It also passes on ready.mobi, which as we know has the DTDs fixed... So, it seems that validator.w3.org has some issues with xhtml mp 1.2, and I think any validation service that relies on the dodgy DTD will also have an issue.
Ruadhan O'DonoghuedotMobi
Posted by garbetjie 6 weeks ago
It's awesome that you guys have managed to implement a workable workaround for this rather annoying issue.
But what does it mean for ordinary developers? Does it mean that we can't really make use of the standards that are *supposedly* available and working? Would we need to host our own DTDs if we wanted to make full use of XHTML MP 1.2?
From what it seems like to me, we're now kind of limited to using MP 1.0, which kind of defeats the point of having later versions of the standard.
I know it isn't your fault, it's just that it's really frustrating that the OMA seems so lazy/uncaring to even bother fixing a rather simple character issue after almost 2 years.