For many years, despite having my <body> element’s padding and margin set to 0, there was always about 30 pixels of vertical space that always existed at the top of my document. To account for this, I’ve been using a negative vertical margin to get all of my content to align from the top. That’s right, I was able to sleep at night for many years knowing that something was including unnecessary vertical space in my HTML. Today, I decided I was going to do something about it.
After an hour of debugging…which later degenerated to me just removing everything in a HTML document until I was left with a blank document, the phantom vertical space still existed. New documents didn’t show the spacing. Only old documents and new documents created based on the old documents showed this behavior. That was just bizarre.
Given that a blank document based on an older document showed the same problem, I decided to check the encoding. This was my last resort before leaving everything behind and starting a new life in…Belize near John McAfee. Fortunately for the people of Belize, it turned out that a BOM was indeed there. It was inside a single server-side included document that populated the things inside my <head> region. Removing the BOM fixed the spacing issue.
If a BOM were to ever walk down the street near where I live, I will do bad things to it. VERY BAD THINGS :gm:
EDIT
Oh, and if you ever need to check whether a BOM exists in your pages, use the following checker: http://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/
