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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T21:42:29+00:00

This may be a dumb newbie question, so appologies for that. My website is

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This may be a dumb newbie question, so appologies for that.

My website is using a SSL certificate. I also include the W3 validator link in each of my webpages as follows:

<a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer"><img src="valid-xhtml1.png" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict" height="31" width="88" /></a>

(Note: copied over the w3 validator image so SSL wouldn’t complain about unsecure resources).

When I do this, and click on the image to validate the page, I get this message from the validator:

enter image description here

The error mentions requesting the validator unsecurely. So I tried changing the href of the <a> tag to use https for the validator, but then the page simply doesn’t load (I guess because the validator doesn’t use SSL).

Does anyone know a way around this? I am guessing there is not a way to use the code as is, but maybe there is a way to update uri=referer to be uri=https://mysite.com/...? Is there a way to dynamically grab the URL of the current page?

Also, just for further reference, does SSL simply prevent the referer request header from being accessed?

Oh, and I know I can just go to my website using http instead of https, and the validator works. But I’d rather get it configured to work with https too.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ok, so it’s not looking like there is a way to do this with just HTML. So instead, I decided to use JavaScript to handle the issue.

    I removed the <a> tag from around the W3 logo and added an onclick JavaScript function validatePage(). So here is basically a template for an XHTML Strict page that still allows you to include the validation icon.

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
        <title>Title of document</title>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            function validatePage() {
                var validatorUrl = "http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http" + (document.URL).substring(5);
                window.open(validatorUrl);
            }
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Test Template Page</h1>
        <p><img src="valid-xhtml1.png" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict" height="31" width="88" onclick="validatePage()" /></p>
    </body>
</html>

    Notice how the validatorUrl variable trims off the “https” from the URL and instead uses “http”. So I just circumvented using the HTTP referer header.

    Hope this helps someone else.

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