Hallo,
Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is
always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation
of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as
a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page
is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you
are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security
reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing
which encourage you to always set a default char set.
Also geht das doch vor:
<zitat>... unless specified otherwise</zitat>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
???