SDATA or UNICODE

[Gavin McKenzie]

On this issue of accessing characters that aren't in Unicode...

XML provides a way for specifying the encoding of an entity with the
?XML pi encoding declaration.  Why wouldn't this be sufficient.  If the
euro or florin symbol is available in some non-Unicode character
encoding scheme, isn't it sufficient to encode the text which requires
the symbol in the appropriate scheme and use the encoding declaration?

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. 

Methinks that xml:lang points out this need.  Have I missed something in
the spec that permits me to do this?

Gavin.

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