[xjay]

A byte-order mark (BOM) would have the highest priority. [1]

BOM > HTTP charset > HTML meta charset

Also works for local files (not served over HTTP).

> You could skip the meta encoding declaration if you have a BOM, but we recommend that you keep it, since it helps people looking at the source code to ascertain what the encoding of the page is. [1]

[1] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-...

[brabel]

If you send Content-Length: text/plain, I believe there's no browser that will render it as HTML anyway.