[Bug 6613] New: Allow <meta charset="UTF-8"/> in XHTML

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=6613

           Summary: Allow <meta charset="UTF-8"/> in XHTML
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: Spec bugs
        AssignedTo: dave.null@w3.org
        ReportedBy: lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: ian@hixie.ch, mike@w3.org, public-html@w3.org


To address the use case of polyglot documents being served as either HTML or
XHTML, we need to be able to use <meta charset> in XHTML documents.  Allowing
UTF-8 only is sufficient to address this case.

This is the justification for allowing this:
* UTF-8 is one of the defaults for XML, and so allowing this has no detrimental
effect.

* If UTF-16 is being used, the <meta charset> is not needed because of the BOM.

* The presence UTF-8 BOM cannot be relied upon to adequately address this use
case because it is invisible metadata and non-trivial to output in all cases.

* Any other encoding would require the use of an XML declaration, but that
can't be used in a polyglot document, or it would require HTTP headers to set
the charset, in which case, <meta charset> is unnecessary anyway.


See recent IRC discussion of this issue.
http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090223#l-155


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Received on Monday, 23 February 2009 10:51:38 UTC