I usually code using
> Notepad which offers, from the Save As... menu choice, > the Encoding options:
I'm not really sure, as the Notepad I got with Win98 doesn't offer anything but 'text file' and 'all files'(Win98 doesn't do Unicode). What you can try is to save the page as utf-8, open it in Mozilla/Firefox and check the very first characters displayed. If there is no strange character there you know it's OK. I just tried the same trick with good old Wordpad (which has an Unicode option even with W98) and it saved my test file without the BOM.
> Is saving a > file as UTF-8 compatible with the iso-8859-1 meta tag?
I'm not sure why would you want to do this, but here goes some reasoning on general principles. As long as the file is saved as uft-8 it contains the correctly encoded content and it's up to the browser to display it accordingly. Now, the primary source of encoding declaration for the browser is the HTTP header sent by the server along the document (this is the .htaccess stuff I mentioned), which should override every other directive, including the meta declaration. Thus, the browser should choose the correct encoding and display both the english and the vietnamese text. I don't recall anybody really testing browsers with that stuff, so you may be in for unexpected results here: if the browser ignores the rule and chooses to believe the meta directive instead of the header, it would display correctly the english part, but the vietnamese one would be a sequence of empty squares, question marks and/or best-guess ISO-8859-1 characters (two for every Unicode one). As too much things web-related, 'should' is a iffy thing to rely upon.
More, if somebody saves that page to the disk and looks at it later, the only source of encoding information would be the meta stuff, with the same result as above...
More generally, inputing characters not native to my keyboard/OS is to me the most annoying part of it all (I routinely have to input central-european stuff by switching the keyboard layout, meaning I had to remember which key becomes which). If you have the luck to get your content already typed, copy/paste is much more error-proof than the alternatives.
djn
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