Because there are millions of people involved who have millions opinions on the topic and everyone wants their way. Thats why we have the bloody mess called HTM

Because there are millions of people involved who have millions opinions on the topic and everyone wants their way. Thats why we have the bloody mess called HTML as a compromise. "Why can't we assume UTF-8 unless told otherwise?" And this I really do not understand either. I lost hours to restore data, that got lost in conversion from various text encoding formats, discovered too late.