Bug 74819 – Remove document.charset and document.defaultCharset

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WONTFIX
• Component: DOM

[Anne van Kesteren]

Gecko only supports document.characterSet and that is the one DOM4 will keep. The others will be removed from the standard as they do not seem necessary for legacy compatibility.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Document.defaultCharset is not an alias for charset, so let's not discuss it here. Perhaps you meant inputEncoding? If you'd actually like us to consider removing defaultCharset, please file a separate bug, although my initial answer will be similar to the one below.

Both document.charset and document.inputEncoding are well established in standards, and should not be removed from implementations. See <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/level-one-html.html> and <http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Core/core.html#Document3-inputEncoding> respectively.

I would suggest the following course of action: specify all of charset, characterSet and inputEncoding, the latter two being deprecated. Document.charset is writable, and that trait can also be deprecated as far as I know, but it needs research. Implementations will not remove support for any of these in foreseeable future.

The reason why I suggest making charset the non-deprecated one is that it has the longest history in major browsers, and is best known to web developers.

[Anne van Kesteren]

I meant document.charset and document.defaultCharset, neither of which is listed in either of the documents you cite.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

My mistake, charset is not in any W3C spec indeed. Still, it's supported in vast majority of browsers, and removing support from WebKit would be counter-productive.

If you actually meant defaultCharset, then why did you report both in the same bug? It's a completely different feature.