[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Character Encoding and the XML PR (was Re: PR.xml)
> From: David Megginson <ak117@f...> > > - in principle I should be able to sort this by adding something like > > > > <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> > > to the top of the document > > Correct. The other alternative is to configure your web server to > send the encoding ISO-8859-1 in the HTTP header for this document if > the text/xml MIME type is approved, but the problem will reappear if > you download the file and the parse it on your own system. Because the XML encoding declaration is not required (in the sense that it is voluntary, effectively), there is scope for people to generate bad documents. Similarly, correctly configuring a webserver to provide appropriate MIME charset parameter values is voluntary. Obviously, the character encoding is not something that lay users will know about. Which means that it is something that XML software developers and website administrators must be on top of it. For example, even to make a convention like "All XML documents generated at this site must use ISO 8859-1 encoding, and this encoding must be correctly labelled in the header and correctly set in any webserver configuration files" does not require any kind of extensive understanding of character sets and encodings. And it will get most Western sites out of any problems. A software developer (except for a LISP one) probably does not consider it strange that they must know the different types of numbers available to them: integers, floating point; signed and unsigned; long, int; etc. These are taught in University courses; now we have a WWW, programmers will have to become more aware of encoding and character set issues (but still not a great deal) just as a matter of course. Rick Jelliffe xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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