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Re: Why is Encoding Metadata (e.g. encoding="UTF-8) putInside

• From: Philippe Poulard <philippe.poulard@s...>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:30:21 +0200

Costello, Roger L. a écrit :
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Below I describe my understanding of:
> 1. Why the indication of how an XML document is encoded is placed
> "within" the document, and
> 2. How an XML parser is able to parse an XML document before it even
> knows its encoding.

Beware when you use both HTTP headers and an XML encoding declaration ; 
there are some pitfalls :

Content-Type: text/xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
=> the charset is US-ASCII, despite the specified encoding

Content-type: text/xml; charset="utf-8"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
=> the charset is UTF-8

In general for XML over HTTP, you should avoid "text/xml" on behalf of 
"application/xml"

See also:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt

-- 
Cordialement,

               ///
              (. .)
  --------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------
|      Philippe Poulard       |
  -----------------------------
  http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr/
        Have the RefleX !

• References:
  • Why is Encoding Metadata (e.g. encoding="UTF-8) put Inside the XML Document?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@m...>