W3C Invites Implementations of Encoding

The Internationalization Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation of Encoding. 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.