Interesting post in http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/168751/is-the-use-of-utf8-preferable-to-utf8-true , referenced from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4668373 - I didn't know that!
tl;dr: It's helpful to add a hidden form variable “utf8=✓” to forms, to force older IE to use utf8. Perhaps worth adding something like that by default to web2py forms? --
