As in the subject-line. Saw the situation the other day on a page which felt weird to me. Except for markup-delimiting characters such as pointy brackets or the ampersand, escaping, say, German umlauts shouldn't be necessary, should it? Checked the encoding server-side, in-page and by way of HTTP headers, looks completely UTF-8 to me. What's your take on this and do you reckon it could adversely affect SEO or SERP placement?the page