In a Microsoft Security Document, in the Code Review section ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302437.aspx ), it suggests setting the globalization.requestEncoding and globalization.responseEncoding to “ISO-8859-1” opposed to “UTF-8” or another Unicode format.
What are the downsides to using “ISO-8859-1”, in the past I’ve set both to UTF-8 for maximum compatibility.
The downside is that it’s not as compatible. In fact, there are lots of reasons not to use anything but UTF-8.
I looked at that doc page and I’m not sure it’s actually suggesting to use Latin1 – I think it might just be using that as an example.
The HttpUtility encoding methods all use UTF-8 by default, so unless you really didn’t want international characters coming in with your inputs, I don’t see any reason to set it to Latin-1.