HTML 5 defaults to Windows-1252, where charmod requires UTF-8/UTF-16

Richard,

These conflict:

"C027   [S]  Specifications that require a default encoding MUST define
either UTF-8 or UTF-16 as the default, or both if they define suitable
means of distinguishing them."
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#C027

"User agents must at a minimum support the UTF-8 and Windows-1252
encodings, but may support more." -- 8.2.2.2. Character encoding
requirements http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/ 

I don't think that aspect of the HTML 5 spec is going to change;
it's already ubiquitously deployed:

 "Many web browsers treat the MIME charset ISO-8859-1 as Windows-1252 "
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 

Any suggestions on what to do about the conflict? It's not clear
to me why C027 is a MUST. Which WG(s) should we be talking to?

p.s. note the cc to www-archive; i.e. feel free to copy/cite/forward
anywhere.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Monday, 29 October 2007 17:20:44 UTC