Question:

Why are strange symbols "Ã¯Â»Â¿" showing up in the upper left corner of frames on my web pages?

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I am using Microsoft Sharepoint to edit them.

It seems to only happen in Firefox.

It doesn't seem like there is anything in the source code which should be causing this, so I am confused.

Can someone please explain how to fix this?

Here is the site:

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/hpv

Thanks.

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yes... it does not happen using opera, but yes firefox2.

looking at it with hexdump, i discovered it is the bom sequence for utf8

see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_...

my opinion is that such a code must be not present at the start of an html page that, as far as i know, must be ascii for the tag, while the enconding of the contents is specified through a charset spec in a meta tag. it seems to break the html spec, but i am not sure of it...

remove that unuseful 3 byte sequence from the sources, or check for options that say to avoid to put the bom.

--add--

and this really happens because the code appears before firefox2 has decided the encoding of the content... and since the default encoding is Latin1 (ISO-8859-1), it displays the three bytes as Latin1 bytes, instead of as a utf-8 sequence

--add--

who are the silly people that put thumbs down? i would agree if i would have written wrong things or stated opinions like a Truth.

facts: bom (encoded in utf-8, not as 2byte wide char) appears at the beginning of nav.html only (but i did not check every page of course), so if you did ALL the site with Sharepoint, the problem is not the sw itself, since in other places the BOM does not appear.

so we can deduce it is a "spurious" error. fix it and be happy.

but I agree to avoid to use sw that produce bad html code. i do it by hand... and upload with ftp... it seems ugly, but it works and you know exactly what's going on.

by the way, browsers know what to do with "wide char" inside the body if the proper encoding is declared inside the proper meta tag... firefox2 seems to have problem if utf-8 encoded char appear before the charset is properly set. so the problem is not the encoding, it is the (unsenseful for utf-8 encoding) bom char before the <html> tag.

since the encoding seems not to be specified, every browser should stick to latin1 (so does firefox and this is why you see the three chars)

final note:

you can't see the bom inside your editor since it interprets rightly the encoding (as utf-8, very likely) and the bom is always a zero-width invisible char.

--add--

really final add: it looks different from the last time I saw the site, so you tried to fix it. you did it, except int the nav.html file.

in the future avoid editors to put the BOM if you can, or use an encoding that does not need it (every single fixed byte encoding as the Latin family). since your lang is english, it could be enough us-ascii (if you have no accents, special quoting char or such a thing to put).

and be consistent: if you make an editor to believe you used encoding A while you indeed encoding B, your char could be not appear properly (and be transformed in the worst case if one of the encoding is like utf-8)
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Don't use Microsoft Sharepoint. It is generating the "wide code" characters which browsers have no idea what to do with. If you can, see if you can set the editor to a specific character encoding which is compatible with the web page.

The problem code (ÃƒÂ¯Ã‚Â»Ã‚Â¿) is in the upper-left hand corner of the nav.html file.

Ron
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