> Are you sure?  Interestingly the spec states:
>
> "The value of the encoding attribute provides the value of
> the encoding parameter to the serialization method. The
> default value is implementation-defined, but in the case of
> the xml and xhtml methods it must be either UTF-8 or UTF-16."
                            ^^
"it" here means "the default value". Since that's the subject of the
sentence, I think it's clear enough.

yes it does make perfect sense now.... not sure how I read it
differently in the first place.