&#65279 is the culprit for mysterious white gaps

I was coding html with Visual studio, and became so frustrated that CSS sometimes didn’t work and there were some mysterious white gaps.

After struggling for hours I noticed that there were some “&#65279” in the code.

These characters are byte order marks (BOMs), aka “zero width no-break space”, which are totally invisible in the editor (but if you open it in Word and show the hidden marks, they’ll show). In Word they can be replaced with ^u8520.

Visual Studio saves UTF-8 files “with signature” by default, which also saves the BOM characters.

The remedy is to choose the encoding “UTF-8 without signature”.

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