I have sat in on and observed many in-person usability sessions with various applications and websites.

In can tell you right now anyone reading this site is in a completely different universe of tech competency than the general public, and even professionals who aren’t tech-focused.

You would have lost many of them simply with then jumble of letters “UTF-8”.

Yeah, I started writing software a "while" ago. I've encountered a handful of users (and charsets) in my time.

With CSV exports, there's already a good bit of training you have to do WRT the column layout, file format, headers (or not), cell value formats, etc. There's far more lift involved in training users there than ensuring they select "UTF-8" when they select CSV.

And, there's really nothing technical about it, as they don't need to understand what "UTF-8" actually means any more than they need to understand what "CSV" stand for. It's a simple ask in a list of asks.

I weigh this against having every developer now believe they have to check/convert every character set, which can be unreliable and produce garbage, BTW. And, speaking of garbage, there are some encodings that you won't be able to convert in any case, so it would be technically impossible to preserve data integrity without pushing some requirement on the source up to the user.

So, it's about tradeoffs. And, again, if asking users to choose UTF-8 is the difference between customers choosing your app or a competitor's, then you probably need to be more worried about that than your charset encoding.

Hell we just accept xlsx and xls natively. It sucks but it solves many issues. Also causes some, but you'll never get it out of users' heads that Excel files are not a data exchange format.

Definitely helps. Should be able to detect the charset from the Excel metadata, at least.

Of course, if that charset uses code points not available in your app's native charset, then you're kind of back to square one (unless your use case tolerates garbled or missing data).

I hope someday, with improved public education, we can have better users. Unlikely with Gen Z apparently having worse computer skills than the previous generation..

Everyone knowing about character encodings sounds like a lot of time wasted.

Gen Z has skills in what is available and popular today, just like the previous generation had.

Having worked quite a bit in b2b applications, that is exactly the kind of thing that makes customers consider other options.

Interesting. My experience is that business users are much more teachable and mindful than consumers, especially when working with data.