Re: Encoding and validation

Stanimir Stamenkov wrote:
> The XML declaration is optional but recommended:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#dt-xmldecl
>
> If your server configuration is to specify all the resources use
> UTF-8 encoding, then even if you omit the XML declaration but
> nevertheless encode your document differently (e.g. using
> ISO-8859-1) the browser could fail to decode it.  It is a side
> effect of ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 sharing the common US-ASCII base,
> that your document gets parsed o.k. - it just doesn't use non-ASCII
> characters.
>
> If you can't change your server configuration you better save your
> document using UTF-8, which the server is configured to specify.
> The issue is not specific to XML documents - you may check whether
> your server is sending fixed UTF-8 for other documents, also.  It is
> likely this problem will be most visible with XML documents because
> decoding errors are treated as fatal errors:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#dt-fatal
>   

Thank you, Stanimir. Very clear explanation, as a neophyte I was able to 
understand the essence of it.

Bill Braun