Ineiev writes: > On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 12:27:25PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > > AFAIK the encoding declaration is optional, defaulting to UTF-8. In > > that case, we can (and IMHO *should*, but I am no longer an expert on > > current encoding practice) require that our software generate UTF-8 > > and omit the declaration. Non-UTF-8 should be invalid in Info-HTML. > > The fact is that some users have ASCII-incompatible default > encodings (like UTF-16). if we add the declaration, it costs little, > but the pages just work for them.
AFAIK, default encodings are not a problem. If Info-HTML is specified to be served as XML (which has its own issues, but that's one way to do it) then conformant browsers RFC2119-MUST assume Unicode as the coded character set, and will automatically determine the transformation format (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16-little-endian) by checking the first two octets. I believe HTML5 also specifies UTF-8 as the default. Alternatively, for such systems it's trivial to generate UTF-16 from UTF-8.
