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During the i18n telecon it was suggested that, in addition to the current text, the Preface probably ought to mention upfront that the key goal of the Encoding spec is for authors and new protocols and formats etc to use the utf-8 encoding and use the ASCII case-insensitive "utf-8" label to identify it, and that the other encodings are described in the spec in order to establish interoperability in legacy contexts in the Open Web where use of UTF-8 is not feasible. I was actioned to ask whether it would be possible to add an initial paragraph to say something along those lines?
I think this is an excellent idea, because it calls out what the core idea of the document is!
To be fair, the core idea was always to document the legacy encodings. I had not realized at the time there was nothing forbidding new protocols and formats to allow legacy encodings. But I don't mind mentioning utf-8 even more.
https://github.com/whatwg/encoding/commit/d6eaebe4436ada349218ce9b22ccc104e5f8caab
Thanks!