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I am developing a simple webpage at hostgator.com. I have the standard headers, but when I add the following line:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

the page does not work. I would like why.

This is the full header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1 /DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="es" xml:lang="es"> 
... rest of code ...

The server returns me a blank page

Issue solved: The PHP short tags was open.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
8

My best guess is that:

… so the server is trying to process the XML declaration as PHP code. Normally I'd expect an error message, but perhaps there is a PHP setting in play that suppresses errors to the client to avoid leaking data that could be potentially useful to someone trying a security exploit.

Just remove it.

  • UTF-8 is the default
  • version 1.0 is the default
  • It is optional in the spec
  • Given a text/html content-type, an XML prolog will trigger IE6's quirks mode

The latter is undesirable. The former all mean it makes no difference.

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-1 
<?php
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>';
?>
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