Is there any benefit to adding accept-charset="UTF-8" to HTML forms, if the page is already in UTF-8?
character-encoding, encoding, forms, html, utf-8
Solution
If the page is already interpreted by the browser as being UTF-8, setting `accept-charset="utf-8"` does nothing.
If you set the encoding of the page to UTF-8 in a `<meta>` and/or HTTP header, it will be interpreted as UTF-8, unless the user deliberately goes to the View->Encoding menu and selects a different encoding, overriding the one you specified.
In that case, `accept-encoding` would have the effect of setting the submission encoding back to UTF-8 in the face of the user messing about with the page encoding. However, this still won't work in IE, due the previous problems discussed with `accept-encoding` in that browser.
So it's IMO doubtful whether it's worth including `accept-charset` to fix the case where a non-IE user has deliberately sabotaged the page encoding (possibly messing up more on your page than just the form).
Personally, I don't bother.
Problem
For pages already specified (either by HTTP header, or by meta tag), to have a Content-Type with a UTF-8 charset... is there a benefit of adding `accept-charset="UTF-8"` to HTML forms? (I understand the `accept-charset` attribute is broken in IE for ISO-8859-1, but I haven't heard of a problem with IE and UTF-8. I'm just asking if there's a benefit to adding it with UTF-8, to help prevent invalid byte sequences from being entered.)