? in page: UA default encoding

As promised at last week's GEO telecon, an outline of the problem I encountered recently with ? in web pages and default encoding, which you think might be useful in your Getting Started work.
 
* Firefox allows me to set my default encoding. Mine is set to utf-8.
* I see question marks in some pages in place of characters such as apostrophes and quotes; I think these may be of the 'smart' variety.
* I check the source of the page & see no encoding statement.
* In Firefox UI, I change my encoding for this specific page to iso-8859-1.
* Question marks are replaced with more appropriate characters.
 
Question: what setting is Firefox shipped with inc localised versions? Andrew, do you know?
 
Re first point, the HTML 4.01 spec says that " user agents must not assume any default value for the "charset" parameter" - http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2.2.


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Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2005 13:06:46 UTC