Another observation - I usually have encoding auto-detection in Firefox set 'off'. When I change this to 'universal' the detected encoding of the message page in Richard's thread is changed from Western (ISO-8859-1) to Western (Windows 1252). I think these are almost identical, but it's another complication in a complex subject.

This whole topic doesn't bother me much - if I come across a page which displays text incorrectly, and I think it's worth reading, I temporarily switch the encoding. In Firefox, it's only 2 or 3 mouse clicks to choose from 50 or so encodings. I don't know about IE, not having used it since Win95.

Phil