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

[David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>]

> On that basis, it will assume that it is UTF-8.  

It might, or it might assume it's ascii or windows code page 1252 or it
might choose not to view it as an encoded character stream at all and
just read a sequence of bytes. It's just an implementation detail.

> It will then proceed  
> to read the rest of the XML decl and on interpreting the encoding attribute 
> will revise it's guess to be iso-8859-2.

The _effect_ has to be same as if the correct encoding was specified
externally and the whole file, including the xml declaration, is read
with a single encoding, which is the encoding specified in the xml
declaration. In practice a real system won't back up and re-read from
the beginning of the file once it has parsed the declaration, but it's
simplest to imagine that it does.


The point I was trying to make was that the curent document makes it
sound as if it's legal to have an encoding declaration encoded in ascii
which specifies a non-ascii superset (such as utf-16) which is then used
for the rest of the document.


David

________________________________________________________________________
The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:
Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, United Kingdom.

This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The service is
powered by MessageLabs. 
________________________________________________________________________