There several ways to suggest the character encoding of an HTML page presented by a browser. The two that immediately spring to mind are the content-type HTTP header with a character set and the equivalent meta tag. The latter has the advantage that it is actually part of the page and should be available at any time.

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

update: The following reference may be useful - http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset