Why is IE failing to show UTF-8 encoded text?

Question

I have a some Chinese characters that I\'m trying to display on a Kentico-powered website. This text is copy/pasted into Kenticos FCK editor, and is then saved and appears

Answer 1

I can't explain this in detail. But this is indeed a known problem.

Here's a small reproducible code snippet:

    
    
ﺡ
0 0

Save it in UTF-8 and view in IE8. You see nothing. Replace 0 0 by 00 and reload the page. It'll work fine! This is absolutely astonishing. Weirdly, replacing 0 0 by a a or the
by a

will fix it as well. It'll have something to do with failures in whitespace rendering.

Sorry, I don't have authorative resources proving this, but this is just another evidence IE8 isn't as good as we expect it is. Your best bet is to try to change the HTML and/or build it step by step so that it works at some point or when in vain, add the following meta tag to the head to force IE8 into IE7 mode: