Polyglot: in this case, IE displays the page OK, because the proper encoding is what HTTP header sais, as you predicted (the liar is the HTML header). I have not tried Firefox yet, but Opera also renders well those pages. I'm not sure if there is some automatic detection done by those browsers other than what is said both in the HTTP and/or HTML headers. Unfortunately, I can't touch the remote server's code, just live with it...