4 ms·
For backwards-compatibility's sake, where a web page doesn't specify a character set, browsers will assume the predominant pre-Unicode encoding used in your reg
by TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
For backwards-compatibility's sake, where a web page doesn't specify a character set, browsers will assume the predominant pre-Unicode encoding used in your region.
- scrollaway 10y agoWhy is this still the case? UTF8 is dominant now, wouldn't it make more sense to assume UTF8?
- niftich 10y agoThe older the site, the less likely it is that it will have been updated. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that newer sites will either declare UTF-8, or can be modified to declare UTF-8, while old sites stay the way they always were, pre-UTF-8. Keeping the backwards-compatibility heuristic the same makes sense.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoOld sites lacked encoding declarations, and old browsers (e.g. early versions of IE) didn't support them. Sites that want UTF-8 can ask for it.