Re: XML* vs. eXpat - encoding

[CRPence <CRPbottle@xxxxxxxxx>]

  Without regard to any concerns for how something does or does not 
work, well or appropriately, I offer in response to the quoted snippet...

  I have always thought it laughable, that character data could ever be 
considered self-describing of its encoding.  With all the various [and 
possibility any new] encoding schemes, including endian issues, how 
could any stream of bits in any particular encoding, actually define the 
encoding of the complete stream of bits?  Just as with transporting 
those bits, what the encoding is, must be negotiated _outside_ of the 
data itself.

Regards, Chuck

Scott Klement wrote:
> <<SNIP>>
> XML has its own mechanism for specifying its encoding. There's a 
> tag that reads something like this:
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
>
> A program is supposed to read that tag to determine the encoding --
> but the RPG parsers ignore it completely. This is problematic because
> some folks (many folks!) get their XML data transferred from Windows,
> Unix, etc, and the XML data is sent with a tool like FTP, Windows
> Networking, SSH or (most commonly) HTTP. Most of these file transfer
> methods have no knowledge of CCSIDs and do not ensure that the CCSID
> on the i5 is set to the right encoding. Your customers can't be
> expected to make sure the data is encoded a special way! That's one
> of the big advantages of XML: The data is self-describing. So to
> handle XML properly, you'd have to write a program that reads the
> opening <?xml tag and determines the right encoding for you. Seems
> cumbersome to me!
>
> <<SNIP>>