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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T08:06:42+00:00

Why doesn’t this page validate? http://www.jethroweb.nl/test/test.php I think the XHTML code is okay, but

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Why doesn’t this page validate?

http://www.jethroweb.nl/test/test.php

I think the XHTML code is okay, but the W3C Markup Validation Service and the WDG HTML Validator do not agree.

UPDATE: The XHTML code is generated by PHP, this are the first lines of code:

echo '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"';
echo PHP_EOL;
echo '        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">';
echo PHP_EOL;
echo '<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">';
echo PHP_EOL;
echo '<head>';
echo PHP_EOL;

UPDATE2: Maybe it’s more a PHP question. When I paste the generated XHTML code into Notepad++ I see a question mark at the first row:

enter image description here

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As per the W3C validator

    Byte-Order Mark found in UTF-8 File.

    The Unicode Byte-Order Mark (BOM) in UTF-8 encoded files is known to cause problems for some text editors and older browsers. You may want to consider avoiding its use until it is better supported.

    That’s the reason for your error: the byte order mark is a zero-width space, and it’s telling you that character isn’t allowed in the prolog (before the doctype).

    Re-save the file with a text editor that allows saving without a BOM (virtually everything except Notepad).

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