Keith Moore writes:
in an environment where either utf-8 or gb18030 may appear
What environment are you talking about? Who, exactly, uses GB18030? Try
Google searches for charset=gb18030, charset=utf-8, charset=iso-8859-1.
If there are all these GB18030 users, why can't we find mail from them
in publicly archived mailing lists?
As for untagged encodings: There can be only one winner in the end, and
it's obviously going to be UTF-8. Even if the Chinese government demands
untagged GB18030, people are going to deal with that the same way that
people dealt with the United States government demanding OSI, Ada, etc.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago