How to close instance of an XML DOCUMENT?

P3P compliance on my web site

• Hi. I need to make our site P3P compliant, and so far my head is spinning. I've gone through tutorial after tutorial, and have downloaded the IBM P3P editor, but I still have had no success. My site is http://www.consortiuminfo.org and I already have the reference file p3p.xml and the policy file in the "easily located directory" /w3c. I've added the following to my httpd.conf file: LoadModule headers_module libexec/mod_headers.so and AddModule mod_headers.c but that hasn't worked either. I have run my URL through the W3C's validator, and got the following response: *************************************************** Results of P3P validation Target URI: http://www.consortiuminfo.org/w3c/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Step 1: /w3c/p3p.xml Validation URI: http://www.consortiuminfo.org/w3c/p3p.xml Step 1-1: Access check /w3c/p3p.xml can be retrieved. Message: The content type of /w3c/p3p.xml is text/xml. Step 1-2: Syntax check /w3c/p3p.xml has no syntax errors. Step 1-3: Policy URI check /w3c/p3p.xml has some warnings or errors. Error: The URI fragment identifier (#xxx) is necessary to specify a POLICY element in a POLICIES element. /w3c/p3p.xml does not specify P3P policy for http://www.consortiuminfo.org/w3c/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Step 2: HTTP Protocol Validation ( HTTP headers ) HTTP headers have no P3P: header. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Step 3: HTML File Validation HTML document has no P3P compliant link tags. Message: No valid P3P compliant <link> element. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Validator could not find valid policy reference file URI. Validation aborted. *************************************************** And when I check my headers I get: *************************************************** HTTP Headers of: [http://www.consortiuminfo.org/w3c/] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Connection: close Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2002 15:05:05 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.1pl2 mod_perl/1.24 FrontPage/4.0.4.3 AuthMySQL/2.20 mod_ssl/2.6.4 OpenSSL/0.9.5a Content-Type: text/html Client-Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2002 15:05:05 GMT Client-Response-Num: 1 Client-Transfer-Encoding: chunked *************************************************** Please let me know: 1. What I'm doing wrong as far as the locations of files or what I'm missing. 2. What I can do to fix the headers problem (what do I need in the httpd.conf file?) 3. Whether or not I have to write a .htaccess file in a directory, and if so, where do I put it and what should it say? Additional INformation: 1. Server- Apache /1.3.12 FreeBSD/i386 2. I want to use one policy for all directories on the site.

• Answer:

  Barryfreed, you are very, very close. What your reference file is missing is the name of the policy as it appears in your policy file. In my example below, the only change I have made to your reference file is in the POLICY-REF element. Note that I added #PrivacyPolicy to the end of your URI. <META xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/09/P3Pv1"> <POLICY-REFERENCES> <POLICY-REF about="/w3c/policy.xml#PrivacyPolicy"> <INCLUDE>/cgi-bin/*</INCLUDE> <INCLUDE>/htdocs/*</INCLUDE> <EXCLUDE>/logs/</EXCLUDE> </POLICY-REF> </POLICY-REFERENCES> </META> Let's start with that change, and run it through the validator again. Note that this is the preferred method for using P3P, and that you do not need to adujust your headers, nor do you need to have <LINK> tags in your HTML document. You only need to use one method, and this is the preferred method. If the validator report additional errors at that time, simply post it in a Clarification Request and I will respond quickly. Also, if you decide that you want to use additional methods (HTTP headers or <LINK> tags in your HTML) let me know, and I will add information about that, as well. However, you only need to use one method, not all of the methods. I will note here that in your HTML document your tags for P3P should occur before the </HEAD> tag. Currently, they appear after the </HEAD> tag. I hope this helps. If you find any of the information unclear, please do not hesitate to ask for clarification. I found these documents helpful in finding this information: W3C "Make Your Web Site P3P Compliant" http://www.w3.org/P3P/details.html Softsteel "The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P)" http://www.softsteel.co.uk/tutorials/P3P/ Search Terms: P3P tutorial