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HTML How to Make a Website Responsive Web Design and Testing Website Testing

Braydan Willrath
PLUS
Braydan Willrath
Courses Plus Student 900 Points
Posted by Braydan Willrath
Braydan Willrath
Courses Plus Student 900 Points

W3 Validator Error

I've built my website following along very carefully to the videos but I get an error when validating my website through validator.w3.org and I don't understand why.

Error Line 7, Column 141: Bad value http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400italic,700italic,400,700,800|Nova+Square for attribute href on element link: Illegal character in query: not a URL code point. ā€¦:400italic,700italic,400,700,800|Nova+Square' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'> Syntax of IRI reference: Any URL. For example: /hello, #canvas, or http://example.org/. Characters should be represented in NFC and spaces should be escaped as %20.

URL is: http://web-lww0giuyi7.treehouse-app.com/index.html

3 Answers

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Hi Braydan,

The vertical bar | in the google fonts url is an unsafe character and should be url encoded.

Replace it with %7C

iain saunders
iain saunders
9,531 Points
iain saunders
iain saunders
9,531 Points

I found that by entering the URL here:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

easier than scanning through and finding the errors yourself, especially when trying to learn from the beginning.

Esteban Valdez
seal-mask
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Esteban Valdez
Front End Web Development Techdegree Student 8,858 Points
Esteban Valdez
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Esteban Valdez
Front End Web Development Techdegree Student 8,858 Points

I had the same problem and believe it may just be an error with the copy/paste that you do into the validator. I think that your code is actually probably tip top. So don't stress it. =)

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Yes, you didn't do anything wrong. I believe the validator was updated since the time Nick recorded the video and so we don't see the error in the video. Now the validator catches it and all you need to do is url encode that character.

It would be better if google just supplied us with the url and the %7C was already in place. For now you have to go through that extra step.

This blog post contains a table which lists out all the unsafe characters, among other things. http://perishablepress.com/stop-using-unsafe-characters-in-urls/

It also tells you whether you need to encode each category or not.

Here's another link that has some tables for what the codes are. http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/topics/urlencoding.htm

There you can see that the vertical bar, or pipe character, is %7C