Yet another one of those questions I did not have an answer to. "Encoding? Why? Can't you just write it out in hex?"

That's entirely possible. I need to understand the consequences of failing to encode before I will know for sure. Jotting down xmlhack's index of encoding articles for tonight's reading.

More notes on encoding, from the exPat FAQ:

By default, expat assumes that documents are encoded in UTF-8. In UTF-8, ASCII characters are represented by a single byte as they would be in ASCII, but non-ASCII characters are represented by a sequence of two or more bytes all with the 8th bit set. The encoding most widely used for European languages is ISO 8859-1 which is not compatible with UTF-8. To use this encoding, expat must be told either by supplying an argument of "iso-8859-1" to XML_ParserCreate, or by starting the document with <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>.

8:30:18 PM  comment [] | Categories: JobFish Homework| Topics: XML