Updated Candidate Recommendation: Encoding

The Encoding Candidate Recommendation has been updated to take into account changes made to the editor’s draft since its initial publication as a Candidate Recommendation. These changes are largely due to issues discovered during implementation. This is a snapshot of the WHATWG document, as of 29 September 2015 and no changes have been made from the original in the body of the document other than to align with W3C house styles.

If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please raise them as github issues against the latest editor’s draft. Only send comments by email to www-international@w3.org if you are unable to raise issues on github. All comments are welcome.

The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding.

The other (legacy) encodings have been defined to some extent in the past. However, user agents 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 addresses those gaps so that new user agents do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations and existing user agents can converge.