I am displaying html entity ✓ (a check mark: ✓) in an html document that uses iso-8859-1 for the character set.
✓
In Firefox, it display
If it's IE, you can reasonably assume it's on Windows, and hence, there's a WingDings font available... The letter ü in MS WingDings is a simple checkmark (similar to ✓), and þ is a checkmark in a box (similar to ☑).