Mozilla Firefox Displays Characters Not in Content nor HTML

[StephenM]

I am looking for an answer to what might either be a very common problem or something specific to Mozilla Firefox users.
Let me explain...

A few days ago I noticed an interesting anomoly: Preceding everything on the page is the three characters as indicated in this w3 forum thread:
-- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2004Dec/0044

They only occur when I open the page with Mozilla Firefox - but Internet Explorer does not show them.
-- http://www.ezcreate.com.au/index.htm

The forum thread above lead me to:
-- http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html

This is hard reading, and I will admit that I don't understand even half of it. But I do get this impression: That the problem may be caused by font-type, font-color, and font-size, or any combination thereof. Maybe I have this all wrong.

So I am looking for someone to explain this carefully and succinctly so I can amend the pages on my website to remove this anomoly.
Please suggest where or how I can fix this problem, and I will advertise your site through my various online-favourite lists*.

(*Disclaimer: This is dependent on what your site endorses, promotes or is affiliated with.)

[drhowarddrfine]

The problem does not occur for any of the font reasons you give above. It occurs because your text editor is saving your text in the utf-8 format. To identify the file text as utf-8, a special code, called the 'byte order mark', is inserted at the beginning of the file. This BOM gets displayed in your web page as strange characters.

To remove them, go to the options setting of your text editor and change the save file setting to ascii.

[StephenM]

It occurs because your text editor is saving your text in the utf-8 format. To identify the file text as utf-8, a special code, called the 'byte order mark', is inserted at the beginning of the file.

Thank you ... you helped me to find the answer.
I discovered that my META was saying this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
When it should say this:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
There are a few other options, but this one works. The validator does indicate that UTF-8 is not fully supported. Research is in progress to find out MUCH more about this.
Thanks for your input ... my web pages look much better for it!