Title: W3 validation issues&#8230;
Last modified: August 19, 2016

---

# W3 validation issues…

 *  [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/)
 * Hi,
 * On one of the sites I’m working on, the home page doesn’t display correctly in
   IE8 (firfox is fine) – the best way to describe it is that all of the content
   is left-justified when it should be centered.
 * The validator states the problem as having a “space” preceding the `<!DOCTYPE
   html PUBLIC "-//`. There is no space preceding that declaration and the header
   works fine on all interior pages. the validation page is here:
 * [W3 Validator
    
   
    Therefore, there’s something wrong with the custom homepage
   itself and I need help to track down the error. (I didn’t build it but I’ve added
   some changes to it.) the site is here:
 * [Learn To Sing Better Fast](http://www.learntosingbetterfast.com/)
 * Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks, Rick…

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

 *  [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * (@songdogtech)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851701)
 * Probably the real error is “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.”
 * Open header.php and resave it as Unicode text, unix line returns, no BOM.
 *  Thread Starter [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851705)
 * Thank you for the response songdogtech.
 * I’ve never done that before, so I’m not sure on how to do it.
 * I’m using MS Expression Web as an editor and I don’t find an option to save-as
   unicode.
 *  [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * (@songdogtech)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851724)
 * I don’t think Expression Web will do that. You need to use Notepad under Windows
   and an FTP clent. See [Filezilla](http://filezilla-project.org/) and [FTP Clients « WordPress Codex](http://codex.wordpress.org/FTP_Clients).
 *  Thread Starter [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851736)
 * Thanks again. I pasted the entire page of code (page-home.php) into Notepad, 
   saved it as unicode, uploaded it the site using Filezilla and everything crashed.
 * I opened the file in Dreamweaver CS3 and it wanted to change some of the video
   code. So I allowed that and then did a save-as there and there’s an option checkbox
   to include Unicode with BOM. I unchecked that box and uploaded the file. Same
   error is mentioned plus a bunch more on the video code.
 * BTW, I don’t understand how transfering files via FTP has anything to do with
   resaving the file as “Unicode text, unix line returns, no BOM”
 *  [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * (@songdogtech)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851780)
 * Transferring by FTP is the easiest way to do it. But try setting Notepad as the
   default editor for FTP, open the file from FTP and resave it as unicode, no BOM.
 *  Thread Starter [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851831)
 * Thanks songdogtech. I’ve tried “editing” the file via the FTP and saving it a
   Unicode, Unicode big endian, and UTF-8 – there is not a “no BOM” option available
   in the save-as dialog box.
 * Only by saving the file as UTF-8 does the page not crash.
 * By the way, all interior pages validate and render fine even though they have
   the same “warning” about the unicode BOM. Logically, the unicode BOM issue is
   not the cause of the error else the error would be on every page.
 * I have commented out the video player and am now down to a single error and the
   single warning. Now, the only error is the same original issue I posted at the
   beginning of this thread:
 * The validator states the problem as having a “space” preceding the <!DOCTYPE 
   html PUBLIC “-//. There is no space preceding that declaration and the header
   works fine on all interior pages.
 * Other actions that I have taken:
    Searched the page-home.php file for any open
   or improperly closed tags. (Did not find any) Copied the validator’s “fixed code”
   and compared it to the original and did not find a significant difference (only
   links or routines called by PHP vs hardcoded). Uploaded the “fixed code” and 
   it crashed the page.
 * Any other ideas?
 *  Thread Starter [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851838)
 * Well, I fianlly got the page to render properly and discovered that using MS 
   Expression Web or Dreamweaver somehow causes the error.
 * In an effort to discover what was causing the issue, I copied each line of code
   into a text file, uploaded it to the site, deleted the “page-home.php” file then
   renamed the text file to “page-home.php”. I did this one section of code at a
   time and then tested the site thinking that sooner or later one of those sections
   would create the error. That didn’t happen.
 * So, I downloaded the error-free file, edited it with a space in a commented section
   and uploaded it back to the server – wham! Same error!
 * So, I uploaded the text file and renamed it again then downloaded it and edited
   it in Dreamweaver, uploaded it and wham! Same error.
 * My conclusion is that the web editors are adding the erroneous (and invisible
   in any editor) code. Really disappointing because this doesn’t happen with any
   other sites/files I’ve worked with?!?
 * BTW, copy-all-paste-all from the PHP page to a text file doesn’t work either.
   The only thing that seemed to work is the copy-line-by-line/upload-as-txt-file/
   change-filetype-to-php.
 *  Thread Starter [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851840)
 * Oh, one more thing. Notepad allows saving the file as ANSI, UTF-8, Unicode, and
   Unicode big endian. Only by saving the file as ANSI do I get correct rendering
   and no error.
 *  [Mark Ratledge](https://wordpress.org/support/users/songdogtech/)
 * (@songdogtech)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851842)
 * Interesting that the editors add bad characters. I only use a plain text editor
   on OS X – called BBEdit – and only know from other experience to use Notepad 
   under Windows. I have always heard that using Dreamweaver causes problems.
 * Might also be a difference in the hosting service. Is it windows or linux?
 *  Thread Starter [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * (@rickwillingham60)
 * [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851843)
 * Linux. The big oddity is that none of the other sites/pages that I edit using
   either editor generate that error. Mystery…

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

The topic ‘W3 validation issues…’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 10 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [rickwillingham60](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rickwillingham60/)
 * Last activity: [15 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/w3-validation-issues/#post-1851843)
 * Status: not resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics
