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

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

> Are there any encodings that have the same encoding of <?xml but
> completely different encodings for other characters?

Yes lots but most of them agree on all of the first 128 slots which is
why the xml declaration is restricted to repertoire. so if you read those
bytes and figure it looks like ASCII, then that is enough to read as far
as encoding="iso-8859-1" or encoding="utf-8" etc, all the iso 8859
encodings, utf8, most european regional encodings on windows, mac etc
all agree the encoding of <?xml (and on on enough characters that the
encoding declaration may be read) but differ in the encoding of
characters above 127. The parser just needs to know the encoding is
sufficiently like ascii, and not (say) utf-16 or ebcdic to read the
declaration. 

David


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