[whatwg] Unicode as alias for UTF-16 (was Re: Default encoding to UTF-8?)

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 9:44 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron at dbaron.org> wrote:
> On Monday 2011-12-19 17:17 +0200, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
>> <xn--mlform-iua at xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
>> > I discovered that "UNICODE" is
>> > used as alias for "UTF-16" in IE and Webkit.
>> ...
>> > Seemingly, this has not affected Firefox users too much.
>>
>> It surprises me greatly that Gecko doesn't treat "unicode" as an alias
>> for "utf-16".
>
> Why?

>From playing with IE, I thought it was known that "unicode" is an
alias for "utf-16" and it had never occurred to me to check if that
was true in Gecko.

> If it's not needed, why shouldn't WebKit and IE drop it?

Needed is relative. So far, I haven't seen data about how much
existing content there is out there that depends on this. It could be
that some users somewhere have rejected Firefox or Opera for this and
there just isn't enough of a feedback loop.

Maybe it isn't needed, but it seems that from the WebKit or IE point
of view, the potential upside from dropping this alias is about
non-existent while there could be a downside. I'd expect it to be hard
to get IE and WebKit to drop the alias.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/