Encoding is a Candidate Recommendation

The Encoding specification[1] has been published as a Candidate 
Recommendation. This is a snapshot of the WHATWG document, as of 4 
September 2014, published after discussion with the WHATWG editors. No 
changes have been made in the body of this document other than to align 
with W3C house styles. The primary reason that W3C is publishing this 
document is so that HTML5 and other specifications may normatively refer 
to a stable W3C Recommendation.

Going forward, the Internationalization Working Group expects to receive 
more comments in the form of implementation feedback and test cases. The 
Working Group believes it will have satisfied its implementation 
criteria no earlier than 16 March 2015. If you would like to contribute 
test cases or information about implementations, please send mail to 
www-international@w3.org.

The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of 
Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore for new protocols 
and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this 
specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding.

The other (legacy) encodings have been defined to some extent in the 
past. However, user agents have not always implemented them in the same 
way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing 
with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This 
specification addresses those gaps so that new user agents do not have 
to reverse engineer encoding implementations and existing user agents 
can converge.



[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-encoding-20140916/

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2014 16:45:38 UTC