Bug 111930 – Webkit violates HTML5 by supporting XML encoding declaration in HTML

• Status: VERIFIED
• Resolution: INVALID
• Component: DOM

[Leif Halvard Silli]

ISSUE: 

 * Webkit supports the XML encoding declaration in the HTML parser
 * IE and Firefox do not
 * HTML5’s encoding sniffing algorithm do not.
    
CONSEQUENCES:

 * In short, it goes against interoperability. Or, to cite
   Alexey Proskuryakov, in a somewhat similar context:

   "Widely implementing a useless MAY-level
   feature will also mean that authors will start relying on it
   (intentionally or not), which further increases the barrier of
   entry for new browsers, hurting competition, and eventually end
   users, too." https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66185#c6

PROPOSAL:

    Drop support for XML encoding declarations in the HTML parser.

[Eric Seidel (no email)]

Presumably this is the code:
http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/loader/TextResourceDecoder.cpp#L527

[Ahmad Saleem]

We still have this code, do we need to anything further here:

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/c74e2dd4d5886b9a328977a6b46b98a7830b7128/Source/WebCore/loader/TextResourceDecoder.cpp#L532

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

WebKit behavior is still the same, and it matches Chrome and Firefox, so I'd say that there is nothing to do.

[Anne van Kesteren]

https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/800a2dcd1ad0ae5f0d08bc93c033336926e32ad2 changed the HTML Standard to add support for this.

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commit/a20f39ae7d4a7b1679ee384e6d71b3b8a772e327 removed leftover UTF-32 code paths in this part of the code.