Some websites do not populate the charset property of the content-type header so characters aren't rendered correctly. Suggestion is to expose a -charset parameter, however the user still needs to know the expected charset. Advanced users today can do the encoding translation in script. utf-8 probably works in most cases, so not entirely sure how useful this will be to expect the user to know ahead of time the correct charset.
See discussion from #3126 for details on how this came about