Default UTF-8 is better than the linked suggestion of using a heuristic, but failing catastrophic when old data is encountered is unacceptable. There must be a

Default UTF-8 is better than the linked suggestion of using a heuristic, but failing catastrophic when old data is encountered is unacceptable. There must be a fallback. (Note that the heuristic for "is this intended to be UTF-8" is pretty reliable, but most other encoding-detection heuristics are very bad quality)