Rick Jelliffe: "At the moment, the web uses an ad hoc mix of defaults (ASCII for pre-90s standards, ISO 8859-1 for early 90s standards, UTF-8 for recent standards), out-of-data headers (such as MIME headers), voluntary in-data signals (such as HTML's meta tag), magic numbers (such as XML's encoding header), browser and server settings, hidden attributes (such as on HTML forms) and guesswork (such as browsers often use). This is rubber-banded together in a nebulous hierarchy that some labels, defaults, etc. could be trusted in preference to other labels, defaults, etc."