IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari all have locale-dependent defaults for HTML. The process used is essentially: user-override, BOM, higher-level metadata (e.g.

IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari all have locale-dependent defaults for HTML. The process used is essentially: user-override, BOM, higher-level metadata (e.g., Content-Type in HTTP), meta pre-parsing, and then a locale-dependent default (Windows-1252 in most locales). Anything labelled "ISO-8859-1" is actually treated as Windows-1252 in browsers (they differ only in ISO-8859-1's C1 range, so Windows-1252 is a graphical superset). http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/parsing.html#determining-the-character-encoding http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/... has the detail of what all browsers implement nowadays.