Is "Meta character set" not consistent?

Having “Meta character set” enabled in the Domino Web Engine section in our Server document, the server adds a line as follows on each page it creates:“”.

The charset is dependent on the situation: when a node is on the HTML document, and that node contains any (Domino generated) form elements ( tag for example), the charset is as above.

Otherwise the line reads

“”.

Why is that? And how can I change the setting, so it is always the same?

tia for hints!

Background: I want to place a passthru HTML Input field on a $$ViewTemplate form in order to allow any user (even Readers) to enter a search string. However, since the $$ViewTemplate form does not contain any form elements, Domino adds the US-ASCII charset directive, and by that any special characters in the search string (such as the german u Umlaut) are converted into HTML character entities (such as ü).

Subject: two possible workarounds

One workaround is to use the R6 form property “On Web Access - Character Set” and set it to “Western European”. However, this has to be done on a per-form and per-database level, and the price is a totally decentral management of the “character set” setting that results in an uncontrolled situation for both administrators and developers.

That’s why we opted for workaround two: we wrote an input string parsing function that maps HTML character entities to the right Windows/ANSI characters.