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Error Line 1, Column 0: character "" not allowed in prolog. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3. Why is the above error even being displayed? Nothing before the DOCUTYPE declaration is a good thing!
The character  appears as nothing on the screen. Turning BOM off seemed to fix it but it still is a problem that needs to be fixed.
The validator seems to be doing the right thing here. Two BOM chars at the beginning of the document is likely to be the sign of a buggy editor.