what is a parse error and how do I fix it

Question

I am having trouble with my site, www.jeremyspence.net78.net there are supposed to be five different color spaces, and there is only three, so I tried using a css validator and it said there is a parse error on the parts of the css I am having trouble with, but I don't understand what is wrong with it and why it isn't working here is the validator http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=www.jeremyspence.net78.net&profile=css3&usermedium=all&warning=1&vextwarning=&lang=en and here is the css

#mecontainer {
    width: 100%;
    height: 1080px;
    padding-top:50px;
    background: #cecefe;
}
#supportcontainer {
    width: 100%;
    height: 1080px;
    padding-top:50px;
    background: #fecefe;
}

Answer 1

You have some sort of invisible character that the validator is choking on somewhere (ie. it looks and acts like a space, but it isn't the space). If I view your CSS file directly and copy/paste the contents into the CSS validator's direct input validation, it validates.

Answer 2

The problem characters in http://www.jeremyspence.net78.net/css/general.css can be analyzed using Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer using the Display Format option “Hex”. It can then be seen that they are hex A0. The character encoding does not seem to be declared anywhere, so browsers (and validators) have to guess. If UTF-8 is implied, A0 is a data error at character level. If ISO-8859-1 or windows-1252 is implied, it stands for NO-BREAK SPACE, which is not allowed in CSS.

The origin of the problem is probably in some authoring program that has converted a normal SPACE to a NO-BREAK SPACE. It looks like a space, walks like a space, quacks like a space, but it still isn’t a space, in CSS parsing. So you need to edit the CSS file and replace the offending indentations by simple spaces.