If we use a non-breaking white space unicode " " in XSLT, then the XML output file may appear as "Â " (capital A with circumflex above it) using an editor that doesn't understand UTF-8.
The solution was to cause the XSLT stylesheets to produce certain characters (the problematic ones) as character references (such as Š) instead of directly encoding them in UTF-8 within the final HTML documents that picfolio creates. The reason this works is that the character that occupies that particular numerical position (hexadecimal A0 or decimal 160) is exactly the same whether the encoding is UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 or ASCII. The Unicode consortium took great pains to ensure that the numerical-index (the position of a character in a character set) of UTF-8 kept both the ASCII (7-bit English) and ISO-8859-1 (Western-Latin-1) characters in their same exact locations within the UTF-8 character set or table, which contains many more characters than both ASCII and ISO-8859-1.
SO, to get a web browser to produce a literal non-breaking space, the
(X)HTML document must contain the character sequence   (the
actual character reference for a non-breaking space) rather than
"Â " (capital A with circumflex above it) by using the
XML syntax allows any character to be written as numeric character reference, e.g. ב (Hebrew letter BET).