First public working draft of Encoding published

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Encoding.

While encodings have been defined to some extent, implementations have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can converge.

This is a snapshot of the Encoding Living Standard, as of the date shown on the title page. No changes have been made in the body of the W3C draft other than to align with W3C house styles. The primary reason that W3C is publishing this document is so that HTML5 and other specifications may normatively refer to a stable W3C Recommendation.