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Why put # wombat urls ß before the actual HTML code?

It seems like every page on the plosone site :

# wombat urls
 ß

Before any actual HTML starts. Why should it be? I saw a tick in the header to check (forcefully?) UTF8 support, but it seems odd to have this whole phrase and even weirder to put it outside the HTML code ...

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Probably a mistake

Incorrectly or accidentally received result code is invalid. The snippet of code you link is most likely an unintentional relic from the server side of the script.

According to the W3C, documents must consist of the following parts in the order shown:



  • Optional, one "BOM" character (U + FEFF).
  • Any number of comments and spaces.
  • DOCTYPE.
  • Any number of comments and spaces.
  • The root element as an html element.
  • Any number of comments and spaces.

The code snippet is not a "specification" ( order byte ), HTML comments, and a combination of spaces; therefore it is invalid .

It's also worth noting that while most modern browsers can handle this invalid piece of code (by ignoring it), it will cause some versions of Internet Explorer to render the page content in "Quirks mode". See this answer to the question " Can comments appear before a DOCTYPE declaration? "

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