[whatwg] Default encoding to UTF-8?

[Henri Sivonen]

On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:
>>
>> Regarding your "(and 16)" remark, considering my personal happiness at
>> work, I'd prioritize the eradication of UTF-16 as an interchange
>> encoding much higher than eradicating ASCII-based non-UTF-8 encodings
>> that all major browsers support. I think suggesting a solution to the
>> encoding problem while implying that UTF-16 is not a problem isn't
>> particularly appropriate. :-)
...
> I don't think I'd call it a bigger problem, though, since it's comparatively
> (even vanishingly) rare, where untagged legacy encodings are a widespread
> problem that gets worse every day we can't think of a way to curtail it.

>From implementation perspective, UTF-16 has its own class of bugs than
are unlike other encoding-related bugs and fixing those bugs is
particularly annoying because you know that UTF-16 is so rare that you
know the fix has little actual utility.

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