RE: SDATA or UNICODE
Tim Bray (tbray@textuality.com)
Wed, 28 Jan 1998 14:29:38 -0800
At 04:10 PM 28/01/98 -0500, Gavin McKenzie wrote:
>On a related note...I have felt that it should be possible to attach the
>encoding declaration to any element in a manner similar to xml:lang.
>Typically our customers (who often are not able to make use of Unicode)
>require the ability to switch from one character encoding scheme to
>another on the fly within the same physical document (e.g. switching
>from Shift-JIS to Latin-1 and back). Referencing an external entity
>makes it possible, but not acceptable for our customers.
That's a reasonably obvious idea, and we kicked it around. There are
some real problems with it, including increased complexity in buffering
schemes, and the fact that you can no longer generate an accurate MIME
header. So for 1.0, this is just not on.
>Methinks that xml:lang points out this need. Have I missed something in
>the spec that permits me to do this?
No. -Tim