[Bug 12897] In some parsers, UTF-8 BOM trumps the HTTP charset attribute (Encoding sniffing algorithm)

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12897

Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #18 from Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> 2011-12-02 08:26:26 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #17)
> Henri, what do you think the spec should say here? (If you think no change is
> needed, please close the bug. Thanks!)

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
you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: The precedence of HTTP encoding declaration over the internal
encoding declaration is indeed backwards in the light of Ruby's Postulate
(http://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/devcon/69.html). However, the main issue
is HTTP vs. meta. The BOM is mainly a theoretical sideshow. Since, for
compatibility, performance, etc., we aren't changing the precedence of HTTP and
meta, it's not worthwhile to tweak the precedence of the UTF-8 BOM, which in
practice is a sideshow (mainly because it makes sense to configure text editors
not to emit it in order to make the text editors useful for editing formats
that misbehave if the UTF-8 BOM is present). When we aren't changing the
precedence of HTTP and meta to give higher precedence to the value that
logically has the higher probability of being right, it makes sense to fully
retain the current order which is logical in another way: precedence is given
to the outermost encoding indicator.

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Received on Friday, 2 December 2011 08:26:32 UTC