I18N-ISSUE-30: Allow utf-16 meta encoding declarations [HTML5]

I18N-ISSUE-30: Allow utf-16 meta encoding declarations [HTML5]

http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/30

Raised by: Richard Ishida
On product: HTML5

4.2.5.5 Specifying the document's character encoding
[http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html5-20100624/semantics.html#charset]


WG Approved: Yes


Currently you are not allowed to use <meta charset="utf-16"> or the
equivalent pragma directive in utf-16 encoded documents. While logically it is
not needed to identify the character encoding, it introduces a special case for
authors to remember, and almost certainly many authors will be unaware that
this is disallowed and will do it. In addition, in-document declarations of
this kind are particularly useful for developers, testers, or translation
production managers who want to visually check the encoding of a document
(since the bom cannot be seen). Furthermore, there would appear to be no risk
incurred by allowing this, since the document would be encoded in utf-16
anyway.

Note that the ask is not that the encoding of the document be determined by the
meta element - the bom remains the way of determining that information - solely
that no error or warning be raised if the meta element is used.

Please make an exception in the spec for utf-16 so that it is allowed to use
<meta charset="utf-16"> or the equivalent pragma directive in utf-16 encoded
documents.


Please add comments to bugzilla:
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10890


IMPORTANT: This issue was moved from our old review tracking system to the new tracker system. For previous mail relating to this issue, see: http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/advanced_search?keywords=&hdr-1-name=subject&hdr-1-query=%20Allow%20utf-16%20encoding%20declarations&hdr-2-name=from&hdr-2-query=&hdr-3-name=message-id&hdr-3-query=&index-grp=Member__FULL+Public__FULL&index-type=t&type-index=public-i18n-core%40w3.org&resultsperpage=20&sortby=date