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

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