title: showing umlauts in html with utf8 charset
body: <p>This question is most likely answered many times before, but I have searched some hours now and I still don't understand one basic thing (most probably the utf8-charset itself...).</p>
  
  <p>I have a <strong>html with german umlauts</strong> "ä" and "ö" (<code>&amp;auml;</code> and <code>&amp;ouml;</code>):</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
  hällö
  &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which results into the output of "h�ll�".</p>
  
  <p>When I leave out <code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /&gt;</code> <strong>the result becomes "hällö"</strong> in my browser (probably with some german charset settings??) - as it should be.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Why don't umlauts work like "normal" (ASCII) characters in utf8-charset
  and what can I do to make them so (beside of encoding, decoding and masking)?</strong></p>