- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 18:54:19 -0700
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Cc: "M.T. Carrasco Benitez" <mtcarrascob@yahoo.com>, Travis Leithead <Travis.Leithead@microsoft.com>, Erik van der Poel <erikv@google.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>, "www-international@w3.org" <www-international@w3.org>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Chris Wilson <Chris.Wilson@microsoft.com>, Harley Rosnow <Harley.Rosnow@microsoft.com>
On May 31, 2009, at 3:45 PM, Larry Masinter wrote: > > > Changing the default charset from *something > well known* to *something else* would be a bad > idea -- that would be "default charset switching". > > But changing the charset from "known, please guess" > to "UTF-8" doesn't seem like it is "default > charset switching", it's "default charset > setting". HTML4.01 says that UAs MUST NOT have a default charset. But the de facto standard is that the default charset must be WinLatin1. If no charset is explicitly specified, some UAs will use heuristic charset autodetection, or in some cases bave a locale-specific default. But effectively the default is WinLatin1 (Windows-1252). Removing the heuristic processing when the HTML doctype is present might be appropriate, since a fairly small proportion of sites depend on it and generally modernizing a site will include properly declaring the charset. However, changing the baseline default from WinLatin1 to UTF-8 would be problematic for exactly the reasons I cited. Was my message unclear on the fact that the current effective default is WinLatin1? I cited it specifically. Or are you saying that there's no default only in the legalistic sense? Regards, Maciej
Received on Monday, 1 June 2009 01:55:00 UTC