Re: [dita] DITA "givens" to document

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@innodata-isogen.com>]

Don Day wrote:

> Encodings:  The normal DITA vocabularies presume a standard encoding of
> UTF-8.

The encoding of any XML file is entirely outside the purview of the 
vocabulary and I don't think it's either necessary or appropriate to say 
anything about it.

XML already provides mechanisms by which documents can (or must) declare 
the encoding they use.

It might be appropriate to say that "for the purpose of wide 
interchange, DITA users should prefer one of encodings required to be 
supported by the XML specification (UTF-8 and UTF-16)" but that's as far 
as we should go. It's up to the parties doing the interchange to agree 
on the encodings the interchanged files use.

To the degree that a given XML parser supports a given encoding, the use 
of any particular encoding in a given XML document is transparent to all 
down-stream processors anyway.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
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