UTF-8 in Internet Explore 8 causing page to span entire browser

ANSI Page (http://simplyuseless.info/testansi.php)
UTF-8 Page (http://simplyuseless.info/testutf.php)

Both of the above pages are almost identical, but one is in ANSI encoding while the other is in UTF-8 encoding. I am using a widescreen computer with more than 1024 pixels in width, so the page (which is set in CSS to be 1024 pixels) shouldn't take up the entire web browser, however, in the UTF-8 page it does and the stretching makes everything look sloppy.

Maybe IE is ignoring the fact that you've set the width on the body element.

I didn't look at all the css, but if you take that out and set the appropriate width on the div that's supposed to be 1024px, you should be ok.

I have body width set to 1024, everything else is in percents. I'm just curious as to why it only ignores the width setting if the page is in UTF-8 and only in Internet Explorer.

short and quick solution is if possible use 'IE7 emulator' meta tag, to fix this problem for IE8. Emulator will render ur page same as it renders in IE7. but make sure that page is fine in IE7 before using this meta tag.