lucy24 - 4:46 pm on Sep 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

This: <meta charset="UTF-8"> locally, is getting the file opened as plain text. Page info gives "text/plain" as Type.

Isn't happening over here. What FF version and OS are you on? html5 is supposed to be all lower case, but my FF doesn't seem to care.

Setting a default character encoding should have no effect. That's just to tell the browser what to use when
:: cough-cough ::
a page doesn't include a charset declaration.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" charset=utf-8">

Did something fall out of the cut & paste there? As printed, I would expect it to make things worse ;)