On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 10:55 AM, André Warnier
<aw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
1) *don't use Notepad to edit HTML pages*. Use a real editor, properly aware of character sets and encodings, and which will highlight incorrect UTF-8 characters.
Notepad has a big problem when saving UTF-8 encoded files : it writes a "BOM" at the beginning of the file, which is not only totally unnecessary for UTF-8, but also confuses other programs.
A BOM is a sequence of 2 or 3 bytes, meant in some cases to indicate the "byte order" of the file that follows.
Just for the sake of information, DreamWeaver MX also pulls this nice stunt, _also when editing PHP files_.
This can lead to annoying problems when a PHP script tries to modify the HTTP headers, since the headers will already have been written, and (depending on PHP solution; mod_php, fastcgi, suphp etc.) will produce nasty errors.
When you open a file with a BOM in a UTF-8 aware editor, the BOM is hidden.
Software producing BOM makes things go BOOM.
