[missblit]

The reason it works locally is because charset detection works different when loading from a local file than when loading from a webserver.

In particular browsers tend to be a lot more enthusiastic about treating local files as unicode than they are for responses from web servers.

The reason the meta charset doesn't pick up is you're missing quotes around `utf-8` (also it may be past the 1024 byte mark, hard to say without running wc).

[necovek]

The reason browsers' charset autodetection works differently locally is likely because HTTP standard specifies Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) as the default encoding (at least in 1.1).

[myfonj]

Or server sends explicit charset in HTTP header (`Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8`), so meta element override is not needed at all. Naturally, there is no such header present in file:///.