title: character encoding html - utf-8 instead of latin1
body: <p>I had a web page template that was basically just:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;...&lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But text in the body was (incorrectly) being interpreted as latin1 by my browser.  So I changed it to:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml encoding="utf-8"?&gt;
  &lt;html&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;...&lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This fixed the problem and the text was interpreted correctly as UTF-8 in my paticular browser (Chrome 17.x on Linux 3.x), however...</p>
  
  <p><strong>What is the best way (most current browser-compatible and forward-compatible) to specify that the text in a html page is encoded in UTF-8?</strong></p>