I am working on some programs in spanish, so I need to use accent marks. This is why I use 
 # -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*- and <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> on all my programs (python). I tested in chrome,firefox and safari and they all work puttin the accent marks. The only one that does not work is IE8. It does not apply the accent mark, and add some other character instead.
Does anyone know if there is a problem with IE8?
Is it better to use UTF-8 instead?
It is better to use UTF-8.
Note that "iso-8859-1" is a common mislabeling of "windows-1252", also known as "cp1252". Try being more explicit and see if this resolves your issues.
ISO-8859-1 Not working on IE