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Comment by isolay | Hacker News Reader

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isolay·

The "without meta utf-8" part of course depends on your browser's default encoding.

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What mainstream browsers aren't defaulting to utf-8 in 2025?

All of them, pretty much.

html5 does not even allow any other values in <meta charset=>. I think you need to use a different doctype to get what the screenshot shows.

While true, they also require user agents to support other encodings specified that way: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#characte...

Another funny thing here is that they say “but not limited to” (the listed encodings), but then say “must not support other encodings” (than the listed ones).

It says

> the encodings defined in Encoding, including, but not limited to

where "Encoding" refers to https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org (probably that should be a link.) So it just means "the other spec defines at least these, but maybe others too." (e.g. EUC-JP is included in Encoding but not listed in HTML.)

Ah, I understood it to refer to encoding from the preceding section.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t for pages loaded from local file URIs.

I spent about half an hour trying to figure out why some JSON in my browser was rendering è incorrectly, despite the output code and downloaded files being seemingly perfect. I came to the conclusion that the browsers (Safari and Chrome) don't use UTF-8 as the default renderer for everything and moved on.

This should be fixed, though.

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