Re: [whatwg/encoding] Allow conformant implementations to support non-UTF-8 encodings (#144)

The Encoding Standard seeks to be normative over Web browsers. In the context of Web browsers, it would be bad to suggest that browsers can support other encodings, because that would result in Web content that's browsable in some browsers but not others. Importantly, additional encodings don't add any expressiveness to platform over UTF-8 anyway, since everything decodes to Unicode.

It's already understood that despite an occasional email-motivated tiny spec change (such as the addition on the "ms932" label), the Encoding Standard is insufficient for email clients. Specifically, experience suggests that an email client needs to support one additional decoder: for UTF-7. Yet, we _really_ don't want UTF-7 in the Web Platform.

Thunderbird already supports UTF-7 decoding outside the framework that Gecko provides for Web content.

Now that Gmail and Apple Mail always send email as UTF-8 and have done so for a while, recipients just have to be able to deal with it. As a result, sending non-UTF-8 email doesn't make sense for other email clients and I encourage Thunderbird to get rid of the capability to send non-UTF-8 email.

What does your extension try to do and why? 

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Received on Sunday, 20 May 2018 07:30:25 UTC