> the firefox JS consoel is throwing me a rather weird validation error.

> illegal character
> 楷桴⠠潤畣敭瑮਩੻††...

That string of odd characters is what you get if you try to read in this ASCII
string:

> with (document)
> {
>     write('\bVersion: 1.0.0 - 12-13-2004\b');
> }


as UTF-16. Firefox is simply complaining that the odd characters don't appear
to be executable JavaScript of any sort.

The problem is that your web server is serving JavaScript files with the header:

  Content-Type: text/javascript

However this does not tell the web browser what character encoding the file is
using. So it has to guess. Firefox's guess is "the same encoding as the HTML
page that referenced it". And for some reason your HTML page is saved as
UTF-16, an encoding which uses two bytes per character instead of one, and
hence one of the few encodings that isn't compatible with US-ASCII.

To fix, either make the server specify a character encoding for JS files by
sending a header such as:

  Content-Type: text/javascript;charset=utf-8

or save the HTML file in a format compatible with US-ASCII. UTF-8 is a good
choice.

Windows calls the UTF-16 format "Unicode" when you save it, which is pretty
misleading and might have lead to this inappropriate choice of encdings to
save under.
and@doxdesk.com