Setting the charset through Apache

By default, apache will ignore the META tags specifying a charset. To avoid this take a look in httpd.conf:

# Specify a default charset for all content served; this enables
# interpretation of all content as UTF-8 by default. To use the
# default browser choice (ISO-8859-1), or to allow the META tags
# in HTML content to override this choice, comment out this
# directive:
#
#AddDefaultCharset UTF-8