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To address the use case of polyglot documents being served as either HTML or XHTML, we need to be able to use <meta charset> in XHTML documents. Allowing UTF-8 only is sufficient to address this case. This is the justification for allowing this: * UTF-8 is one of the defaults for XML, and so allowing this has no detrimental effect. * If UTF-16 is being used, the <meta charset> is not needed because of the BOM. * The presence UTF-8 BOM cannot be relied upon to adequately address this use case because it is invisible metadata and non-trivial to output in all cases. * Any other encoding would require the use of an XML declaration, but that can't be used in a polyglot document, or it would require HTTP headers to set the charset, in which case, <meta charset> is unnecessary anyway. See recent IRC discussion of this issue. http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090223#l-155
This bug predates the HTML Working Group Decision Policy. If you are satisfied with the resolution of this bug, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html This bug is now being moved to VERIFIED. Please respond within two weeks. If this bug is not closed, reopened or escalated within two weeks, it may be marked as NoReply and will no longer be considered a pending comment.