title: HTML page <title> not interpreted as UTF-8 when using SSI
body: <p>To make my website look-and-feel consistent, I heavily use SSI. All my pages have the same header (save for the title) and footer. These act like templates and are included with an SSI directive. Variable field content is provided throug SSI #set-variables.</p>
  
  <p><em>This is the nearest equivalent to "functions" I found without resorting to HTML generators.</em></p>
  
  <p>A standard page structure is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!--#set var="PageTitle" value="Référence" --&gt;
  &lt;!--#include virtual="/header.shtml" --&gt;
  &lt;section&gt;
      Specific page content
  &lt;/section&gt;
  &lt;!--#include virtual="/footer.shtml" --&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>File <em>header.shtml</em> contains <code>&lt;!DOCTYPE &gt; &lt;html&gt; &lt;head&gt; ... &lt;/head&gt; &lt;&lt;body&gt; &lt;header&gt; ... &lt;/header&gt;</code> and similarly <code>&lt;footer&gt; ... &lt;/footer&gt; &lt;/body&gt; &lt;/html&gt;</code> for <em>footer.shtml</em>.</p>
  
  <p>File <em>header.shtml</em> creates the title for the page with an element:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;title&gt;&lt;!--#echo var="PageTitle" --&gt;&lt;/title&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Everything is fine as long as my title string for variable <code>PageTitle</code> contains only printable ASCII character (i.e. as long as I'm writing in English). Things become more complicated if I want to insert a title in any language using characters outside the ASCII printable set.</p>
  
  <p><em>If this string is put asis in the</em> <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> <em>element, there is no problem.</em></p>
  
  <p>As an exemple, the French word above print as <em>RÃ©fÃ©rence</em>. The UTF-8 sequence \x52 \x53 \xA9 ... prints as if it were ISO-8859-x. \x53 \xA9 is the UTF-8 sequence for \xC0 + \x29 = U+00E9 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, which is the desired character.</p>
  
  <p>I have tried to use some <code>encoding=</code> attribute in the <code>#echo</code> directive, to no avail, since it affects ISO-8859-1 special characters and does not seem to understand UTF-8.</p>
  
  <p>From what I see in the HTML sent by the server, the string uses entity references for any "dubious" character:</p>
  
  <pre><code>R&amp;#195;&amp;#169;f&amp;#195;&amp;#169;rence
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Is there a way to put Apache SSI #echo processing in "transparent" mode?</strong></p>
  
  <p>Apache manual says <code>encoding=</code> defaults to <code>entity</code> (which I get as a result). It can also be set to <code>URL</code> to protect URLs against malicious use (i.e. % escape). But, there is no <code>none</code> setting.</p>
  
  <p><em>Of course, as a workaround, I could use directly character entity references in the string, but this is not user-friendly: it is much more comfortable to type a character which is accessible from the keyboard and having the target character on screen eases proof-reading.</em></p>
  
  <h1>Edit:</h1>
  
  <p>SOLVED!</p>
  
  <p>Solved, but I don't know if it is "standard".</p>
  
  <p>I tried adding <code>encoding="none"</code> in the offending <code>#echo</code> statement and everything went fine!</p>
  
  <p>Now, I must check if this is available across different Apache versions.</p>