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Subject: NEW ISSUE: XML Snippets should not contain encoding declaration.



Target: C++ C&I spec and C C&I spec CD03 Rev 2 of both

Description:
Here is a excerpt of an exchanged that took place in the Bindings TC.  The points being made are applicable to our specs as well.

But of more important, as a general rule, I don't think we should include encoding in inlined text examples in any of our specs. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
XML files without encoding attribute on the XML declaration is valid and usually not necessary especially when BOM takes care of it.


I agree, we could have just removed the entire line and it wouldn't harm the example. The fact that it was an example may lead someone to copy/paste it and then later get surprised by the encoding as they modify it. If the line is there, I think it's a better practice to make it portable.

I agree that encoding="ASCII" in our examples is a bad idea. But it should not be assumed that sticking UTF-8 necessarily solves all the problems of cut-paste-edit. The editor used may not recognize the XML encoding attribute (or is it pseudo-attribute?) and may save it in a non-UTF8 format. This (UTF-16) is actually not uncommon for say Japanese characters, where UTF-16 is preferred as it results in a smaller disk size for the file. If portability is a concern *and* if the XML decl is to be retained, we should not include the encoding pseudo-attribute at all. The assumption here being that in the cut-paste-edit scenario the editor would do the Right Thing wrt byte-order marks. I think this is a safer assumption.

Note the suggestion in the second paragraph.

Proposal:
Remove lines of the form: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="..."?> from all snippets

Bryan Aupperle, Ph.D.
STSM, WebSphere Enterprise Platform Software Solution Architect

Research Triangle Park,  NC
+1 919-254-7508 (T/L 444-7508)
Internet Address: aupperle@us.ibm.com


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