[Bug 15076] Make UAs use UTF-8 as fallback encoding if the page has a HTML5 doctype

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15076

Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
                 CC|                            |hsivonen@iki.fi
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #2 from Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> 2011-12-07 08:19:06 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #1)
> Try to get a browser vendor to ship it. If they can, I'd be happy to change the
> spec.

My editorial assistant hat asked my HTML parser module owner hat. Therefore:

EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale:

We already have *three* backwards-compatible ways to opt into UTF-8. <!DOCTYPE
html> isn't one of them. Making the change proposed here would violate the
Don't Reinvent the Wheel design principle.

Moreover, I think it's a mistake to bundle a lot of unrelated things into one
mode switch instead of having legacy-compatible defaults and having granular
ways to opt into legacy-incompatible behaviors. (That is, I think, in
retrospect, it's bad that we have a doctype-triggered standards mode with
legacy-incompatible CSS defaults instead of having legacy-compatible CSS
defaults and CSS properties for opting into different behaviors.)

Making this change would make the encoding selection behavior even more
confusing to authors than it is now, since using <!DOCTYPE html> would lead to
radically different behavior in old and new browsers.

Furthermore, currently the doctype mode processing happens on the tree builder
level but efficient encoding sniffing needs to happen before tokenization. It
would be *even* more confusing to have case where encoding sniffing <!DOCTYPE
html> and CSS mode sniffing <!DOCTYPE html> get out of sync.

If the author wishes to minimize declarations, (s)he can put the UTF-8 BOM
followed immediately by <!DOCTYPE html> at the start of the file.

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Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 08:19:10 UTC