Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Windows-1252" in English language version.
if a document does not contain a CHARSET encoding value, the default encoding for HTML documents is ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin1. The default encoding for plain text documents is US-ASCII.
If you use typographers' quotes without specifying the right character encoding for your HTML file, some of your viewers are going to see question marks, boxes, or other crazy symbols instead of the beautiful curly quotes you intended them to see.