Hmm, the bytes I'm seeing are not UTF-8 for the pound sign. If I change IE5's setting to use UTF-8 encoding rather than "automatic", then I see the pound sign in the browser, but View Source still shows what I think must be C3 A3. Ahh (double checking), A-with-curcumflex is C2, not C3. Now it checks: I'm seeing the bytes interpreted in the Latin 1 character set.

I suppose that in absence of any charset attribute or indicator, Windows uses its current 8-bit character set.

I wonder why PerlMonks doesn't use a charset meta tag?

—John