I'm in the process of redoing one of my websites using Expression Web (EW). The website was created and maintained with FrontPage (FP).

I've begun to create some master pages (which will become templates) and am having several difficulties. One, described, here, relates to the appearance of BOMs (Byte Order Marks) at the top of pages in Firefox 2.0, despite the fact that the US/Western European meta code,

<meta http-equiv="Content Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

is in the header (see: <URL: http://www.enfolded.info/references/refPhilosophy.htm >.

According to FMEB, this meta code addresses the problem, but not for me.

If I copy/paste (not Select All) the code to notepad and then paste it into a new file in FP, the BOMs are removed (see: <URL: http://www.enfolded.info/references/refPhilosophyNoBOMs.htm >, but this is an awkward workaround for this problem.

Any suggestions as to why the BOMs are appearing even with the meta code, above, and any ideas of a more practical workaround?

Hmm, using ISO -8859-1 in my master page has prevented BOMs from appearing on my pages. Though if you are using master pages unless you are running Mono on your server you should not be seeing BOMs. So here are my suggestions:

Check what is in the http header being sent by your server. If there is a conflict you may see the BOMs. There are extensions for Firefox and IE add-ins available that will display the http information so you can check the encodign there. If there is a mismatch you will see the BOM.

Make sure that the characterset matches under Site > Site Settings > Language and Tools > Page Editor Options > General (at least I think its general I don't have Expression open to check right now.)

Run Steve Eason's FP Cache Cleaner (updated to include support for Expression Web and SharePoint Designer) then recalculate hyperlinks.

You may also need to run Christoph's macro to remove the BOM from existing pages. Link on this page http://by-expression.com/tutorials/characterset/