Is it a good idea to use the utf-8 charset?

How do you change a page from one charset to another?

[zollerwagner]

I build multilingual sites. All of them so far use European languages. I've been using the iso-8859-1 charset, but I've read that utf-8 might be a better choice. Earlier threads in WebmasterWorld indicate that utf-8 was problem-ridden (at least in 2002).

1. Has the browser/server/editor context changed today, making utf-8 a viable option?

2. How do you change a web page from one character encoding to another? Is it just a matter of opening it in an editor like Dreamweaver and saving it as a different encoding?