Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/23/07 19:36

Scripsit Bergamot:

> cwdjrxyz wrote:
>>
>> Is there some specification by the W3C that says UTF-8 or UTF-16 must
>> be used for some version of xhtml 1.0 or xhtml 1.1?
>
> I believe W3C recommends UTF-8, but there is no requirement to do so.

I think we should refrain from claiming that W3C (or some other
organization) recommends something unless we _know_ it does.

I have not seen any such recommendation. You could construe the _default_ as
a recommendation: XML documents are assumed to be UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded,
unless specified otherwise.

Then there's the practical point that if you use some other encoding, you
should declare it in the XML declaration, which throws IE 6 into Quirks
mode. This has nothing to do with W3C recommendations, though. Besides, you
can specify the encoding in HTTP headers, unless the server administration
prevents that.

There's also the practical point that UTF-16 is a poor choice for web pages,
due to poor support in browsers and search engines.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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