Four Unwanted Characters = Angry Louie...

Entry for May 28 2008 @ 12:22:00 am EST

So...

I've been reworking my original site, GeeksNeverSleep.com. I hacked up the page structure in such a way that I now have a very modular website. I can pretty much plug and chug, as we programmers like to say, and have a new page in less than five minutes, easy.

So Step 1 was a success. Yay me, right?

Nope.

I've been getting inconsistent rendering from the four browsers I use to test my pages: Opera, Firefox , Safari, and Internet Explorer. The IE bugs I pretty much expect. But I was getting weird gaps in Firefox and not in either Opera or Safari. Needless to say, this concerned me.

So I've spent the better part of three days hacking up the CSS, making small changes here and there to try and fix the problem. Nothing worked!

Then...

Grrrrrrr.....!

I noticed four little characters on one of the pages.

Oh, Jesus, please tell me THAT isn't the problem!, I wailed.

Deleted those dastardly characters, uploaded... and the problem is fixed.

@@#$%#@$%#@.

In case you're wondering: those characters make up what is called the Byte Order Mark (BOM) and is used in Unicode documents. And Firefox and IE don't know how to handle them...

...

F**k.

:)