iamlost - 10:38 pm on Apr 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

BTW what is utf-8 and where is it supposed to be on the page?

Character encoding, entity references and UTF-8 [webmasterworld.com] from WebmasterWorld library [webmasterworld.com]:

In order to overcome the hodge-podge of incomplete, conflicting and aging standards (the ISO-8859 series date from the early 1980s), the notion of Unicode was developed. ... By far the most important Unicode version on the web is UTF-8. This standard have numerous advantages, the most important of which is that it remains compatible with the much earlier US-ASCII standard. In fact, all of the single-byte ASCII characters are represented in exactly the same way in UTF-8. Only extended characters are different, made from multi-byte strings defined for each character, whether an e acute, an oe ligature, or characters from Arabic, Russian, Urdu or Japanese. UTF-8 is especialy important for XML as it is the default encoding for all XML documents. And as you can't use HTML entity references and earlier ISO-8859 standards are incomplete, UTF-8 is the only logical choice when dealing with XML formats such as RSS or Atom which, even if you are only using English, are more than likely to eventually need more than the basic ASCII charset can offer. UTF-8 is incredibly useful in HTML/XHTML too - no more entity references, the possibility to use extended characters such as curly quotes or long dashes, the possibility of using one charset across a multi-lingual site. ...