Intent to Deprecate and Remove: UTF-16 support in TextEncoder
Joshua Bell
Primary eng (and PM) emails
jsb...@chromium.org, l.pa...@gmail.com
Summary
Remove the TextEncoder argument allowing selection of encoding; only UTF-8 will be implicitly supported.
Spec issue was: https://github.com/whatwg/encoding/issues/18
Chrome tracking bug is https://crbug.com/595351
TextDecoder remains unchanged, and supports UTF-16 along with other legacy encodings.
Motivation
The TextEncoder API never supported non-UTF encodings. Support for UTF-16 was retained from initial designs "by committee" but without explicit use cases.
It turns out that the Web Platform doesn't need UTF-16 encoding anywhere; even pages served as UTF-16 parse URLs and submit forms as UTF-8. So it would be nice not to expose this legacy cruft, especially if no-one is actually using it.
Compatibility Risk
Firefox already made the update: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1257877
W3C's web-platform-tests are updated as well: https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/pull/2781
Alternative implementation suggestion for web developers
function encode_utf16(s, littleEndian) {
var a = new Uint8Array(s.length * 2), view = new DataView(a.buffer);
s.split('').forEach(function(c, i) {
view.setUint16(i * 2, c.charCodeAt(0), littleEndian);
});
return a;
}
Usage information from UseCounter
https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/popularity#TextEncoderUTF16 reports 0%.
Using the raw data, the usage in stable is something like 0.00000000001% (that's a lot of zeros)
(It's likely more people will read this mail than ever used the feature.)
OWP launch tracking bug
The usage numbers are low enough that a launch tracking bug seems like overkill, but happy to file one.
Entry on the feature dashboard
The usage numbers are low enough that a dashboard entry also seems like overkill, but happy to file one.
Requesting approval to remove too?
Yes.
Philip Jägenstedt
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