Q:

Why does dojo inlined template html contain strange leading character(s)? 

My actual template html file begins with "<div" but the inlined string has a non-visible character that I can only observe in a hex editor.   I assume this is a known issue with a known workaround? 

A:

0xEF,0xBB,0xBF is the UTF-8 encoding of the U+FEFF Byte Order Mark.  It is inappropriate to include a BOM in a UTF-8 file—it's meant for byte order specification in encodings that actually care about byte order, like UTF-16.  But many Windows-based tools do so anyway because life would be too easy otherwise. 
Whatever tool you used to create the template decided to save it encoded as “UTF-8 with faux-BOM”.  How you stop it doing that depends on that tool; for text editors there is commonly a choice of encodings at save-as-time; look for “UTF-8 without BOM”. 
Alternatively (or additionally!),  whatever tool you use to read in the template and create the inlined version needs to recognise and remove the faux-BOM when decoding from UTF-8.