Re: Encoding and validation

Hello Bill,

As a general advice, setting your server so that it serves an HTTP 
header with charset=utf-8, and then only uploading utf-8 content, and 
streamlining all your production to utf-8, is considered a good thing 
these days, in many if not most cases. (I do the same since for about 5 
years now with my own server.)

However, while such a setup is good for production, it's not good for 
testing e.g. various different encodings. For that case, you have to set 
up a separate server, or some specific directory of a server, and mostly 
hand-tune the settings to make sure your tests aren't affected by 
external factors.

Regards,    Martin.

On 2010/01/16 22:24, Bill Braun wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:[email protected]