I've followed a similar path to yours, and the best choice eventually
for my projects was to make sure everything is utf8.
Having said this, the specific bug that bit me in the ass was Firefox
3.0 messing up character set encodings for anything using Ajax-style
calls. Fortunately, 3.1 fixed it.
Jonathan Rockway wrote:
> When you are working with iso-8859-1, you need to do exactly the same
> thing. Everything you read needs to be decoded, and everything you
> need to write needs to be encoded. (In this case, it is sort of an
> uphill battle since most people use Unicode now, and that is
