According to the HTML standard (see <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4�) the right way to specify the charset in html is to use the http-equiv attribute in META tag with a value "Content-Type" and put the charset value after the "text/html; charset=" in the value of the content attribute. The HTML specification does not specify the order between http-equiv and content attribute nither does it prohibit other attribute (such as charset=UTF-8 ) to be place.
Well then, have it from the horse's mouth: <http://validator.w3.org/>
Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.
Line 4, column 14 :there is no attribute "CHARSET" (explain... ).
<META charset=UTF-8 http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
