Re: [xml-dev] [Summary] Why is Encoding Metadata (e.g. encoding="UTF-8")

["Pete Cordell" <petexmldev@tech-know-ware.com>]

Hi Roger,

One small observation on your web page summary...

I don't think the UTF-8 text in the HTML charset declaration should have 
quotes around it (or rather the left quote around it shouldn't be there). 
e.g.:

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; Charset="UTF-8"  />

should be:

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; Charset=UTF-8"  />

Otherwise the value of the content attribute becomes malformed even by 
HTML's standards!

Also, this text is not quite right:
    "These are all ASCII characters. Thus, an XML parser opens the document, 
interprets
    the bit strings as ASCII characters up to the first ">" character. From 
then on, it interprets
    the rest of the document using the encoding it finds in the XML 
declaration."

Your section on the algorithm is closer to the mark.  Basically, it uses the 
algorithm to guess the encoding.  For example, given the example you show it 
would assume UTF-8.  It would then read on, and when it interpreted the 
encoding attribute could switch to ASCII, ISO-8859-*, shift-JIS and so on as 
appropriate.

HTH,

Pete.
--
=============================================
Pete Cordell
Codalogic
for XML Schema to C++ data binding visit
 http://www.codalogic.com/lmx/
=============================================

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:05 PM
Subject: [xml-dev] [Summary] Why is Encoding Metadata (e.g. 
encoding="UTF-8") put Inside the XML Document?


Hi Folks,

As always, outstanding comments!  Thanks!

I have incorporated your comments.  Please let me know if I am missing
anything, or have incorrectly interpreted your comments:

http://www.xfront.com/specifying-encoding/

I am particularly interested in hearing if you agree with the
recommendations that I list.

/Roger

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