Mix encodings in a document?

[Deke Smith]

I think I know the answer I am going to get, but I'll ask anyway.

Within a single XML document, is it possible to have the text encoding 
change from element to element? 

For example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<PHRASES>
<PHRASE encoding="ISO-8859-1" xml:lang="en">Hello!</PHRASE>
<PHRASE encoding="X-EUC-TW" xml:lang="zh-TW"><!--chinese language text 
here--></PHRASE>
</PHRASES>

At the least, I can imagine XML browsers and parsers will cough up a hair 
ball on this. My feeling is that this should NOT be valid, but I don't 
know for sure. The way I see that the specs allow for this is for the 
character encoding to be UTF-16 for the whole document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<PHRASES>
<PHRASE xml:lang="en">Hello!</PHRASE>
<PHRASE xml:lang="zh-TW"><!--chinese language text here--></PHRASE>
</PHRASES>

Deke



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Deke Smith
Tallent Communications Group, Brentwood TN
deke at tallent.com, 615-661-9878
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" The best way to predict the future is to invent it. " 
       - Alan Kay 



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