Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 09/19/06 19:23

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Andy Dingley wrote:

> Is there ever a possibility of a <meta> encoding being useful in valid
> XHTML ?

Only in 1.0 Appendix C, and then it's only there for HTML
compatibility. Even there, it's not a necessity.

(I suspect that your question was rhetorical and you already know the
answer, but anyhow, that's my "take".)

> If it's not UTF, then you must already have made it manifest
> from externally to the file, just to keep it as valid XML. Even if
> you're on a filesystem and not a web server, you'd be forced to put it
> into the XML PI

Indeed. From a deeper theoretical standpoint, I really hate this idea
of polluting the data with its own metadata; but it's the way things
went - I guess there's no use crying over it now. Just that XML moved
the pollution from a <meta...> to the <?xml...> thingy. The right
place for such metadata (on the web) is the HTTP protocol, not stashed
inside the data itself. The problem, as you rightly point out, is
what to do with static files that aren't being accessed by HTTP.

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