UTF-8 and latin1

[Tobiah]

> Generally speaking browser submisisons were/are supposed to be sent
> using the same encoding as the page, so if you're sending the page
> as "latin1" then you'll see that a fair amount I should think. If you
> send it as "utf-8" then you'll get 100% utf-8 back.

The only trick I know is to use <meta charset="utf-8">.  Would
that 'send' the post as utf-8?  I always expected it had more
to do with the way the user entered the characters.  How do
they by the way, enter things like Montréal, Quebéc.  When they
enter that into a text box on a web page can we say it's in
a particular encoding at that time?  At submit time?