I18N-ISSUE-77: HTTP and defaulting to UTF-16LE [HTML5-prep]

I18N-ISSUE-77: HTTP and defaulting to UTF-16LE [HTML5-prep]

http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/77

Raised by: Richard Ishida
On product: HTML5-prep

8.2.2.2 Character encodings
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/parsing.html#character-encodings-0

"When a user agent is to use the UTF-16 encoding but no BOM has been found, user agents must default to UTF-16LE."

If the HTTP header declares the file to be UTF-16BE, which I believe it can, and in which case a BOM should *not* be used, then I think that this would not be true.  If the HTTP header declares the file to be UTF-16, then there must be a BOM, so I assume that this is a recovery mechanism if someone does declare UTF-16 in HTTP but omits the BOM.  I'd think that some kind of error message would be in order though.

Received on Friday, 22 July 2011 16:11:28 UTC