Can anybody help me figure out why I get the BOM symbols at the start of my HTML and what I'm doing wrong in general? All my site currently consists of is a bg image, header banner on top of bg image, html (which validates), css which validates and lightbox2 js + images. I saved all the code in notepad as UTF-8, but when I upload the html using CuteFTP it adds the BOM to the start. The site only displays correctly in FF, except if I remove the BOM marks or take out the line <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> it messes up too and shows fragmented background image. I've changed the encoding type to both w/ and w/o BOM, but it doesn't seem to make a difference, if I save the HTML in notepad as ANSI or unicode doesn't make a difference either. If I save it without <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> initially it doesn't help. So I'm stumped. If you think you can and you'd like to help please pm me for the URL. Thanks.
Try a different text editor? Really, who uses Notepad these days? Unproductive, IMO. If you're into learning, I suggest you try VIM. Otherwise, something like editpad would do.
Ok, let's try a couple of things here (in the order I say). Change the declared character encoding in your META tag from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 (or UTF-16), save it with that encoding, open up CuteFTP and see if it has the option to either include or exclude the BOM (if it does, choose exclude), and then check to see that your server is really sending the page as UTF-8 (or UTF-16, depending on how the page was saved) instead of something else, such as ISO-8859-1.
Thanks, but I just changed the site. I managed to get rid of the BOM by saving it in something other than notepad, however it still duplicated the background and I couldn't fix it so I just moved the body of the page up. Thanks again, though.
Or just restrict your code to 7 bit ASCII with entities, serve as ISO-8859-1 and avoid all the bullshit headaches that UTF-8 is in the first damned place.