Why is "& #65279;" appearing in my HTML?

I see this character in Firebug "."

The character in question "&#65279" is the Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE' (U+FEFF). It may be that you copied it into your code via a copy/paste without realizing it. The fact that it's not visible makes it hard to tell if you're using an editor that displays actual unicode characters.

Just use notepad ++ with encoding UTF-8 without BOM.