Re: encoding issues

> How can you be sure? 
You can never be sure of anything.

An XSLT processor is explictly allowed to ignore the requested output
and use an output encoding of its choice. For example MSXML always does
this if you output to a string rather than to a file, or equivalently if
you output to a DOM tree then there is no output encoding at all (as
it's not output in that sense) so if you later serialise that dom you
get whatever _that_ serialisation asks for, not what was in the
xsl:output.

In the html output method this doesn't matter so much because the system
adds the <meta element and will specify in there whatever encoding it
really used.

In the xml output method the best you can do is output a meta element
that specifies the output encoding you requested, but if the system
chooses a different encoding it will not change the meta element to
match, as the xml output method just sees <meta as a normal element that
happens to be in the result tree. In practice if you are targeting
something specific like msxml you can tell what output encoding will be
used: either it obeys the requested one from xsl:output or it always uses
utf16, depending how it is called. It would be legal for an XSLT system
to change it's behaviour depending on the time of day, but few if any
do.

David

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