What could go wrong in switching HTML encoding from UTF-8 to UTF-16?

Question

What are the implications of a change from UTF-8 to UTF-16 for HTML encoding? I would like to know your thoughts on the issue. Are there things I need to think of before m

Answer 1

As far as I know all modern browsers support UTF-16 encoding. But as others have pointed out, you should declare the encoding explicitly. Not all browsers and platforms will support all unicode characters, but I think this is regardless of which encoding you use.

However, if bandwith is a big issue you should probably consider gzipping the HTML. This will save much more bandwidth than switching encoding.