While trying to validate my most recent work, i was refused with this message...

A fatal error occurred when attempting to transcode the character encoding of the document. Either we do not support this character encoding ("none") yet, or you have specified a non-existent character encoding (often a misspelling).

...and this applies to all of the pages i had validated over two months ago. Suddenly, even though i haven't changed any of the code on any of the pages, none of them validate and are given the above message. I am confused. I have a character encoding. Even more confusing, when i try to validate the off-line pages, they validate fine. What is the problem? I have been going through some problems with my host recently. They switched servers and in doing so some things got a little weird. My php click counter suddenly lost about 300 clicks and i had to upload a few things that were removed during the process. I am wondering if this has anything to do with it.

By the way, this applies to all of Apethumb, including the templates. So, for the moment, i am declaring validation even though nothing validates.

That is very bizzare. Maybe they updated the validator?

the problem looks to be server related as the headers are returning with

Content-Type: text/html; charset=None

probably they have the MIME types set incorrectly

also your content type is
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" />

I would suggest using

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

to override the server settings.

April...They have updated the validator since my last validation, but nothing that should affect me.

Chrishirst...just as i thought, server problem. I have tried using iso-8859-1 and it still wouldn't validate. If it is the MIME types, what am i suppose to do? I have never had this problem before. After doing some research yesterday for about 4 hours, i determined it was either the MIME or .htaccess. I couldn't, however, find anything to help guide me to a resolution. Any further help would be greatly appreciated.

I dropped my host a line and they said they went to W3C and my page validated fine for them. They also assured me that everything was fine concerning the MIME types, and that if my pages didn't validate then it was the validator that was failing, not my code and not their server. The strange thing is that i have another site hosted by them that does validate. So, i am still very confused. Who is to blame? If anyone has the time to jump on over to the W3C and see if apethumb.arttriad.com validates for you, i would be interested in the results.

Tried to validate it for you, but it seems I get the same error.

A fatal error occurred when attempting to transcode the character encoding of the document. Either we do not support this character encoding ("none") yet, or you have specified a non-existent character encoding (often a misspelling).

The error was: (no error message given)

If you believe the character encoding to be valid you can submit a request for that character encoding (see the feedback page for details) and we will look into supporting it in the future.

IANA maintains the list of official names for character sets and the WDG has some information to help you correctly specify the character encoding.

Thanks for your time ghettobert.