Some websites now will include a hidden input field in all forms <input type...

		alan on May 30, 2013 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses Some websites now will include a hidden input field in all forms <input type="hidden" name="snowman" value-"&#9731" /> to convince IE that it's supposed to be sending UTF-8, not latin1 (And so the site can recognize if the input was likely mangled.

It's built into Rails, except they use utf8=✓ now.