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Re: HTML5 Issue 11 (encoding detection): I18N WG response...

From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:21:55 +0300
Cc: "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>, "public-i18n-core@w3.org" <public-i18n-core@w3.org>
Message-Id: <27052D30-D3E9-4D65-8FB8-FCEB153700C1@iki.fi>
To: "Phillips, Addison" <addison@amazon.com>
On Aug 20, 2009, at 10:15, Phillips, Addison wrote:

> Setting UTF-8 as a default may produce the dreaded "black diamonds"  
> on the screen. But so too choosing the wrong encoding at (relative)  
> random.

The thing is, the indication of the user's locale is not random data  
on a personal computer. It's works rather well when people read Web  
pages in their local language and in English, which is the common  
thing to do.

> This is after all, after everything, even autodetection, has failed.  
> Some encoding must be used to interpret the bytes into characters.  
> Why prefer a legacy encoding here?


Because the autodetection has already recognized UTF-8 with a high  
probability, so there are only legacy encodings left at this point.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Thursday, 20 August 2009 07:22:40 UTC

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