If you look at this...

http://genetsim.org/class/gaw15_problem_3_papers.html

...you'll see that it is messing up the UTF-8 characters, at least in 
Firefox on Linux and Chrome on Windows:

Bickeböller
Josée

But the identical page here is fine:

http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mbmiller/temp/gaw15_paper_page.html

Bickeböller
Josée

I was having the same problem on both machines until I added this line in 
the header:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

That only fixed it on one Apache web server, not the other.  So why 
doesn't that fix it for both servers?  I assume it has something to do 
with the Apache configuration.  Any ideas?

A friend looked into it and told me "Your broken apache server is sending:

   Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

missouri.edu is sending:

   Content-Type: text/html


Look and see if AddDefaultCharset is set somewhere in your config. If not 
it may be set under an AddType directive."

So I checked and found that AddDefaultCharset is there on the genetsim.org 
machine in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:


# Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is
# always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation
# of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as
# a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page
# is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you
# are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security
# reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing
# which encourage you to always set a default char set.
#
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1


But it is commented out on mlug in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

#AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1


It seems strange that Apache's comment text tells us that this is "always 
a good idea" that "does little harm" and it improves security.  It says 
that a page is "in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise," but 
that seems to imply that I can specify otherwise.  Of course, that is 
exactly what I thought I was doing with this line in the header:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Do you know why I'm not able to override the default here?

The machines do differ in version number:

genetsim.org:

$ /usr/sbin/httpd -v
Server version: Apache/2.0.46
Server built:   Oct 28 2008 07:02:48


mlug.missouri.edu:

$ /usr/sbin/apache2 -v
Server version: Apache/2.2.3
Server built:   Nov 13 2009 15:16:06

Best,
Mike