Is there any disadvantage of using: text/plain; ch

Question

My web server serves content that is in 95% of the time just simple ascii. However in some rare cases, the content contains some German non-ascii characters.

Now I could set the content-type response header by detecting if the content contains any non-ascii characters, or I could just always set the response header:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Is there any disadvantage in doing the latter?

Answer 1

No, there is no disadvantage -- but you'll need to spell "utf-8" correctly.

Answer 2

Nope, all it's there for is to tell the browser which character set to decode your response with.

Answer 3

ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so it is perfectly safe to declare the charset as utf-8 for an all-ASCII document.