What is wrong with this XML file?

Question

:: link to xml file removed

View Source in Firefox... I don't see anything out of place.

I don't know if this is any good but I ran it through this.

http://www.validome.org/xml/validate/

Seems to suggest characters before the document? However.. these aren't visible when viewing the source of the document.

Deleted his site and replaced with a working copy to ensure no files had been tampered with / corrupted. Issue persists.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You have a sequence of 8 non-displayable bytes at the start of the stream, before the opening <?. Some parsers aren't going to like that.

Both Firefox and Chrome reject it as an XML document, but their source viewers strip out the leading bytes, so it looks fine.

Answer 2

The first 8 characters are NUL characters. Try removing them.