Windows 1252 served as Latin 1 used to be common enough that browsers interpret a Latin 1 declaration as Windows 1252. Nowadays it seems moderately common for such text to be served with a utf-8 declaration, so it gets mangled in other ways. Or it gets imported into a CMS with no conversion or the wrong conversion, which has a similar result.
You're right, ASCII is more common, but single-byte encoded prose that goes beyond ASCII is usually Windows 1252 in my experience.
> Windows 1252 served as Latin 1 used to be common enough that browsers
> interpret a Latin 1 declaration as Windows 1252.
Thank you, I had not encountered this and I was dealing a lot with improperly-encoded text when I was running gibberish.co.il (over a decade ago). What systems were serving this? IIS would be my first guess, an Intuit product would be my second.
You're right, ASCII is more common, but single-byte encoded prose that goes beyond ASCII is usually Windows 1252 in my experience.