Spurious characters in HTML files using Microsoft Expression

Question

Hello all,

I've got MS Expression Web (12.0.6211.1000).

I usually use Homesite but it and Vista don't get on so I thought I'd try Expression for editing simple HTML files.

I find that Espression Web inserts the characters



at the top of every file I edit, just before the <!DOCTYPE... tag. What are these and how can I make it stop!

Thanks

SAL

Answer 1

This is the Unicode Byte Order Mark; Expression Web is saving in UTF-8.

Answer 2

That is the Unicode Byte Order Mark interpreted as something that isn't a Unicode character encoding (such as ISO-8859-1 AKA Latin-1).

The W3C has a guide to specifying which character encoding you are actually using.

If you don't want to use a Unicode encoding (I suggest you do, they are current standard rather than the ISO-8859 series which are legacy) then the forums suggest that you can change the encoding by going to (oddly) File > Properties... > Language and looking for a "Save the document as" list.