(Note that not all browsers make these assumptions and so not all browsers will behave this way; though other choices of browser behavior usually have worse outcomes.)

Indeed, links-derived browsers behave differently. If you enter non-latin1 characters to a latin1 field, it encodes them as flying accents, not as html entities. (Links already has these tables about converting unprintable characters to approximate ascii sequences becasue that's what it does if a html page contains a character that the encoding of your terminal doesn't support.)