IE5 Mac draws spurious question marks in source

why?

[nevdev]

I was just checking how a page looked in various browsers, and after seeing that it looked OK in Safari and FireFox, I checked it in IE5 Mac, and found that this browser is adding spurious question marks in the source, before URLs, inside a particular div. Thus the element doesn't load properly. The div in question has its position controlled by CSS, and contains an imagemap, but I can't see anything abnormal with it, as neither can the other browsers.

Instead of (eg):

img src="images/AblineWebOut.jpg"

...it shows:

img src="images/?AblineWebOut.jpg"

..etc.

I've checked and re-checked the source in the editor, AND in the source view of safari and FireFox, and there it looks normal (ie, no question marks).

Anyone know why IE5 Mac is adding on these question marks?

Thanks in advance!

[tedster]

That sounds quite odd -- let's start at the ground level:

1. What DTD are you using?
2. Do your hmtl and css validate?

W3C Validator - HTML [validator.w3.org]
W3C Validator - CSS [jigsaw.w3.org]

[encyclo]

It sounds like a strange bug - it could be something like a stray incorrectly-encoded character (such as a zero-width space) in the source code - what charset are you declaring for the document?

[Lorel]

if it is a stray character it could have been caused by copying text written on a PC into the Mac. I find this all the time. It looks ok on your computer but once you get it online you can see the strange character. When this happens run the code through BBedit or some other text editor that can "zap gremlins".