As mentioned I'm developing a site with Dispatcher.
I don't use Internet Explorer, but unfortunately most of my clients
do. Checking my site in IE revealed a problem: Although Firefox
correctly sets the character encoding to UTF8, as set in the XML
declaration at the head of the doc, IE doesn't seem to register, and
defaults to Western, or whatever. The result is a lot of Euro symbols
in the text.

After a bit of messing around it appears that adding an xhtml
namespace declaration to the html element
(xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";) fixes the problem.