@off_grid_living@twtxt.net I see. When I build static websites by hand, I usually do not need a real web server to serve it locally for testing purposes. I use relative links in all the documents and basically never resort to web server features, such as authentication, URL rewrites etc.
I consequently make use of the UTF-8 encoding and state that in each end every one of the HTML files. This keeps me from surprises later on. The web server in the end is configured to automatically include the Content-Type header with the right character encoding (super easy as it is always UTF-8) in the response, so this is very bullet-proof in my mind.
My editor simply does not auto-“correct” anything. This almost never works in my experience. Especially when dealing with computer languages.