This article was first written in July 2004 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/139).
To enable all characters to be displayed correctly in an HTML page, even  if you use different languages (english, japanese, russian, …),  a good way is to encode everything in unicode, using the UTF-8 character set representation.
Server & client config
In Apache config file 
httpd.conf, one of the following must be  defined:
#AddDefaultCharset on
AddDefaultCharset  off
AddDefaultCharset utf-8
More info: