Intent to Deprecate: Document.charset setter
Philip Jägenstedt
Primary eng (and PM) emails
Summary
Deprecate the Document.charset setter, which influences the fallback encoding for external scripts and stylesheets loaded after that point.
Motivation
Document.characterSet is the standard attribute, and yet everyone except Gecko also supports charset, which unlike characterSet can be set.
Document.charset has ~4% usage so I filed a bug to standardize it instead of spending time trying to remove it:
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=27436
Anne's last comment is "I want to wait with adding .charset until at least the setter has disappeared. Removing that seems like a win for everyone. Then we can evaluate again."
Compatibility Risk
External resources could end up being loaded with the wrong encoding. They would in Firefox as well, but it happens that different browsers are served different markup, etc...
Alternative implementation suggestion for web developers
Use <meta charset="UTF-8"> or serve the resources with the correct encoding.
Usage information from UseCounter
https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/427
Usage is ~0.01%, having recently dropped from ~0.02% for unknown reasons.
Entry on chromestatus.com, crbug.com, or MDN
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=438392
Requesting approval to remove too?
No, wait for a bit.
Philip Jägenstedt
deprecation has now been sent to CQ:
https://codereview.chromium.org/768313004/
Chris Harrelson
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