Doing character encoding/decoding within libwww?

For most uses of libwww, developers do little with character encoding.
Indeed, for general-case use of LWP::Simple, they can't, because that
information isn't even exposed.  Has any thought gone into doing this
internally within libwww, so that when I fetch content, I get back text
instead of octets?

I'd be happy to help work on some of this, but the fact that I see no use of
character encodings within libwww makes me wonder if this is more of a
policy decision not to do it.

David