On 2013-08-30 11:17 AM, Adam Roach wrote:
It seems to me that there's an important balance here between (a) letting developers discover their configuration error and (b) allowing users to render misconfigured content without specialized knowledge.
For what it's worth Internet Explorer handled this (before UTF-8 and caring about JS performance were a thing) by guessing what encoding to use, comparing a letter-frequency-analysis of a page's content to a table of what bytes are most common in which in what encodings of whatever languages. It's probably not a suitable approach in modernity, because of performance problems and horrible-though-rare edge cases.
If whatever you'd written turned out to have an unusual letter frequency or (worse) when a comment added to your badly-written CMS tripped that switch, your previously-Korean page would suddenly and magically start rendering in Hebrew or something, and unless you knew something about character encoding in IE it was basically impossible to figure out what had gone wrong or why. From both the developer and user perspectives, it was amounted to "something went wrong because of bad magic."
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