intertwingly

Martin J. Dürst: It is very important to always label Web documents explicitly. HTTP 1.1 says that the default charset is ISO-8859-1. But there are too many unlabeled documents in other encodings, so browsers use the reader's preferred encoding when there is no explicit charset parameter.

Martin describes how to set the charset in a number of popular servers and scripting langauges.  If you see something missing, let him know.