On Thursday 2006-06-01 20:04 -0700, Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
> Second, I know that we have autodetection for codepage of a
> document...just in case the user never set that in the page. The
> autodetection has worked well for a number of years.

It might work well for a browser that has majority market share (so that
most authors test their pages in it) and that doesn't change very often.

It might not work so well if you ever want to change the algorithm.  For
example, detecting an encoding you didn't previously support might cause
a page that used to work to be detected as the newly supported encoding.

It also makes it harder for browsers to interoperate.   If the character
encoding autodetection rules that pages depend on are not documented and
freely implementable then it's much harder for others to implement them.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/  >
           Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation