This is more of a false philosophy than a clear mistake, but nevertheless it is very common:
A compact topological space must be "small" in some sense: it should be second countable or separable or have cardinality $ \le 2^{\aleph_0}$, etc.
This is all true for compact metric spaces, but in the general case, Tychonoff's theorem gives plenty of examples of compact spaces which are "huge" in the above sense.