Intent to Deprecate/Remove: UTF-32 encoding support

[Joshua Bell]

Primary eng (and PM) emails

jsb...@chromium.org js...@chromium.org

Summary

The UTF-32 encoding has, so far as we can tell, effectively zero usage, apart from test pages. We'd like to remove support for consistency with Firefox, Edge, and the Encoding standard.

Motivation

Inconsistency in encoding support (e.g. between client and server) has often lead to XSS attacks; while we're not aware of any threat here, we've been trying to remove legacy encodings - especially those not ASCII-compatible - as usage drops and compatibility allows.

Interoperability and Compatibility Risk

Edge: Not supported

Firefox: Not supported (since 2011)

Safari: Supported.

Generally UTF-32 markup content will end up appearing like raw HTML source - it'll be interpreted as either windows-1252 or UTF-16, with lots of interspersed nulls. You can compare http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/plane1-utf-32.html across browsers as an example.

Alternative implementation suggestion for web developers

Developers should be using UTF-8, or one of the legacy encodings. 

Usage information from UseCounter

We do not have use counters for per encoding usage. (and so far as I can tell we don't capture this in HTTPArchive)

Google crawl stats of 100M pages from back in 2014 show 17 hits (0.000%) and we don't expect this will have increased.

OWP launch tracking bug

Just a normal bug: https://crbug.com/417850

Entry on the feature dashboard

I don't think this merits one, since the usage is in the noise.

Requesting approval to remove too?

Yes (M61)

[TAMURA, Kent]

LGTM1.  Though we don't have UseCounter, the removal must be safe.

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TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

[Joshua Bell]

^^^ I meant M62 here. There's no reason we'd merge this.

[lindseyma...@gmail.com]

TamurMILIStv Jess Nobel BROWN/ HIS
MNHTN THVS JMG

[Chris Harrelson]

LGTM2

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[Mike West]

LGTM3.

-mike

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