[mlnhd]

What does "unicode snowman" have to do with this?

[alan]

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.

[mseebach]

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