Byte Order Mark issue?

3 weird characters appear on my site when loading

[brakai295]

Hi tehre,

when my site is loading sometimes I get to see 3 weird characters (an 'i' with 2 dots, a reversed question mark and a '>>').

One of my colleagues said that it had to do with the byte-order-mark of the document. But I tried to activate and deactivate it in Dreamweaver (see here [adobe.com...] ) with no effect.

Does anybody know how to get rid of this thing?

Thanks!

Kai

[edited by: tedster at 1:15 am (utc) on Feb. 20, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed link - removed site url [/edit]

[wildbest]

The easiest way to get rid of it is to accept it! :)

Your web server sends the following Content-Type header:
Content-Type: text/html

While it should be:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

As soon as your browser is instructed that content received is utf-8 encoded BOM's will be treated accordingly.

[jalarie]

You could fix it by adding this line to your page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

[D_Blackwell]

I'm with jalarie and use the same character set declaration.

Note, however, that you can still have situations where characters won't display properly; often replaced with an encoded ? For example, this can happen if text is pulled out of a Word .doc - Characters such as " may not make the transfer as expected and render as a 'broken character', hence the encoded ? (In FF a black diamond with a ? in the center.)