Don't throw charset out with the bathwater
Ian Hixie: I think it may be time to retire the Content-Type header, putting to sleep the myth that it is in any way authoritative, and instead have well-defined content-sniffing rules for Web content.
The reason why people can safely enter non-Latin-1 characters in
my comments and have them presented properly to all consumers that
have installed the appropriate fonts is that these pages specify
charset=utf-8 in the content-type header.
Sniffing for the character encoding used is clearly not the answer. Nor am I convinced that meta http-equiv is either.