A question about charsets

[jeddiki]

I have noticed that I have been using this
in my metatags:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

However looking at other peopls websites, I usually this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

This site uses:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

What are the reasons for choosing one or the other ?

Is one of them somehow "better" ?

Thanks for any insights on this :)

[Dormilich]

using UTF-8 as charset depends on the Unicode support the system has.

the ISO charsets are quite well implemented for a long time now (because ISO range is much smaller than the Unicode range) so that's a rather safe setting, whereas Unicode is able to display nearly all needed characters natively.

it also depends on the used software (server, DB, …) if you can successfully use Unicode.