[twhb]

I like this change. If a website misconfigures encoding and users have an encoding override menu, the result is 99% of users see a broken website, 1% know how to fix it. The menu doesn’t meaningfully improve the situation, but it does keep the people who could improve it from caring. Take that away and I predict 10%+ of currently misconfigured websites will get fixed for 100% of visitors, and that’s a big improvement over 100% of websites being fixed for 1% of visitors.

[serentty]

So you think that making things miserable for the remaining 1% is good because it gets them to care, and therefore for the website to be fixed? I’m sorry, but most of the time when a website has a borked encoding, it is some website where I doubt I would ever get in contact with the webmaster anyway. It’s mostly small websites. But small websites are important to maintaining a healthy web where things are not dominated by a few big players.

But perhaps most importantly, I have never agreed with any mindset of that encourages punishing some subset of users in order to get someone to change their ways, even more so if that isn’t even the users themselves.

[yoasif_]

> I’m sorry, but most of the time when a website has a borked encoding, it is some website where I doubt I would ever get in contact with the webmaster anyway.

So you wouldn't bother to try to get the webmaster to fix the issue, you would just resolve it on your own, letting everyone else be miserable?

> But perhaps most importantly, I have never agreed with any mindset of that encourages punishing some subset of users in order to get someone to change their ways, even more so if that isn’t even the users themselves.

It sounds like you don't care if people are punished, as long as it isn't you.

[serentty]

> So you wouldn't bother to try to get the webmaster to fix the issue, you would just resolve it on your own, letting everyone else be miserable?

I mean that I would not be able to. Huge swaths of the web are static content that was just put there and then just abandoned. The web will remain this way unless everything is moved onto SPA social networks, and I hope that we agree that that would not a good thing.

> It sounds like you don't care if people are punished, as long as it isn't you.

If the added benefit of causing people more inconvenience is that they push for problems to be fixed, I don’t think it’s fair to cause that inconvenience with the intent of using that to solve the problem. I think it’s a manipulative tactic. That is my idea of what “punishment” we’re talking about. What kind of punishment are you thinking of if you think I’m fine with punishment, and who is getting punished by it?

[yoasif_]

> If the added benefit of causing people more inconvenience is that they push for problems to be fixed, I don’t think it’s fair to cause that inconvenience with the intent of using that to solve the problem. I think it’s a manipulative tactic. That is my idea of what “punishment” we’re talking about.

We are talking about the same punishment.

If fixing the pages would reduce the amount of times people would have to manually fix page encodings locally, just working around the problem leaves the punishment in place for more people.

You express that you are being manipulated to prompt webmasters to solve the underlying problem, even though many more people would benefit from not having to manually work around it.

[serentty]

The thing is that I do not agree with you that the ends justify the means. You seem to think that people seeing fewer pages in the wrong encoding in the long run justifies making the problem worse when it does happen. I do not.

And again, I will reiterate that this does not solve that problem anyway because vast swaths of the web are static content that was put there and never touched again, so no one will fix it. Unless we want everything to live on content farms, it is essential to be able to access content like this. You are viewing the web as something that is actively maintained, similar to a software project. That is true for a certain category of website, such as the one that we are on right now. It is not true for the kind of website which is most likely to have borked text encoding.

[citrin_ru]

Probably much less than 1% English speakers know how to to select a text encoding in a browser, but for speakers of languages where multiple non-utf encodings were common until recently this knowledge is more common.

My anecdata: once having only a smartphone with me I needed information from a txt file in cp1251 encoding. The server was configured correctly for .html, but not for .txt Mobile browsers available on the smartphone didn't allow me to override text encoding. It was very frustrating experience and it would be enough for me to switch to another browser in future except I don't know a mobile browser which allows to select text encoding and not much worse than mobile Firefox. And I don't blame the maintainer of that site - he does (or did) this in his spare time and had more important tasks than to check text encodings for every single URL on the site so users of crippled web browsers would have no problems.

I like comparison of this feature to emergency services - you rarely need it but when you need it you need it very much.