TextEdit's Unicode broken?

Question

I know it sounds ridiculous, but a year ago, when I saved TextEdit documents as Unicode (UTF-8) text files (.txt), everything worked fine. And when using non-Roman fonts everything looked great.
Plus, I could drop those text files in my iPod's Notes section and could see the non-Roman fonts as they should be.
But now using the same Unicode saving preference, the text files do not seem to be saved with Unicode "tags". When opening and viewing the text file, yes, I see the non-Roman font. But when viewing the little snippet in a "quick-preview" in the info column, the fonts are all gibberish. And when viewing these text files in my iPod, it's also gibberish.
I have tried trashing the TextEdit preference plist, but that doesn't help.
Incidentally, I was able to resolve this issue by using TextWrangler's "Reopen using UTF Encoding" and saving as UTF-8 text with TextWrangler.
But I was a bit disturbed by TextEdit's behavior. Anyone else experiencing this too?

Answer 1

I experimented more and found, oddly, that if I saved
TextEdit documents as UTF16 and dropped them into
iPod Notes, they displayed Chinese characters
properly.
There is nothing odd about this. It is the way things are supposed to work.
I also found from this page
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61894
that iPod should be able to read UTF8.
That note is pretty clear than anything besides Latin-1 (or Chinese, Japanese, Korean if your iPod interface is set that way) requires an xml encoding tag. The iPod can certainly read UTF8. But it only knows a text is UTF8 if there is either such a tag (or a BOM) to tell it so. Otherwise it thinks the text is Latin-1 (the default setting).
I think such a universally used app like TextEdit
really should save with BOM if Apple really wants the
whole world to use its iPods, though.
There is no need for that, because UTF-16 does the job. A BOM really does not belong with UTF-8, it being used there is historical Windows garbage. Either the software should use UTF8 as its default or the text should have an xml tag.