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> the browser works out what encoding to use.

Historically, letting the browser guess anything at all has been a disaster. Although IE is all but dead now, there's no guarantee that another browser won't try something similarly reckless in an attempt to be a little too convenient.

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So i guess the question is — should we keep markup for the case where someone downloads our webpage on a legacy browser?

For me the answer is yes, if people are using an old netbook on a dialup connection and they save your site locally to save data. That could be a good idea. I'll do some testing though because I think even old IE defaults to utf-8.

The edge cases are hard to test. IIRC the weirdest issues had something to do with valid UTF-8 content the first X bytes of which also happened to be valid in some exotic charset related to the user's locale. English users would rarely come across such issues.

IE defaults to the locale-dependent legacy Windows code page.

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