On 2009/09/24 3:19, Alfred � wrote:BTW: The proper term would be "encoded character set", or "charset", for short, not "character encoding", isn't it?I don't think the "trigger an automatic conversion process" is a big issue. Conversion of an empty document, if indeed needed for this case, should be very quick. Also please note that the document is created browser-internal, and therefore UTF-8 is way more natural these days than a legacy/local encoding, and may easily lead to less conversions, if any.
Browser internals are typically UTF-16 (though some research from Mozilla suggests UTF-8 might be better for memory at least), but UTF-8 is important (and used already) as encoding details leak through via other means. E.g. when sending the document via XMLHttpRequest, when using URLs, etc.
-- Anne van Kesteren http://annevankesteren.nl/