penders - 11:21 am on Nov 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

Leosghost: Using the wrong doctype can also give this kind of problem..

I don't see how an incorrect DOCTYPE can cause this? I thought this was a character encoding issue? Or can quirks mode trigger this?!

Some folks will tell you to use entities-- named or numerical-- for all non-ASCII characters. This is serious overkill. It makes your html unreadable, and makes it take up twice as much room (in bytes, disk space and bandwidth)...

...and if your overly HTML entity encoded content is pulled from a DB and intended to be searchable - it won't be.

Having said that, £ (the named HTML entity) is also defined in HTML4.