Well. I was faced with the trouble to force a page to be displayed in UTF-8. But although the Content-type meta parameter of the page was – correctly – set to text/HTML; charset=utf-8, the browsers (IE & Firefox) wouldn’t use this encoding. Instead, latin1 was used all the time, which was undesireable because of the Euro (€) Symbol.
If you have access to the web server directory you can specify a default encoding within the .htaccess file: Simply add the line AddDefaultCharset utf-8 to .htacces, and everything should work fine.