Why are apostrophes -- or is it hyphens -- in some posts suddenly showing up as a scrambled mess ??

[AZJonnie]

24. MS didn't invent the characters that are the 'curly' quotes

But it may be the case that Word was the first program (or at least the first really famous one) that automatically converted to them as you typed and sorta 'pairs them up' for you, such that the first one you type curves one way (an 'open' version, if you will), then the next one (in the same line) curves the other way (the 'closing' version). Like so: “Example”. I used the same key for both of those double-quotes, and Word converted them to an open/close pairing like that, that's where the "smart" part comes in.

I don't know that the browser's character set setting impacts this at all, I suspect the issue is already there before you actually see it rendered in your browser but I don't care enough to dig into it, nor know if I could even figure it out. If I was going to guess, it'd be a translation issue happening with the ODBC or JDBC database driver that connects the app server to the DB, which means basically at the exact point the data is pulled from the DB, before anything else happens to it downstream.