> Far more importantly: you get a declaration of the encoding right at the start, so you don't have to guess. True, but it was a lot worse than that. XML forc

> Far more importantly: you get a declaration of the encoding right at the start, so you don't have to guess. True, but it was a lot worse than that. XML forced even the worst programmers to at least think half a second about the existence of the whole encoding concept. Some horrors from the past: receiving so-called text files generated by concatenating multiple exports. Every chunk had a different encoding, and there is no hint when the encoding changes mid-file or what was what. As most of it is ASCII, it seems to work and people don't even understand what the problem is. Another one: XML-support by pasting a CSV file between the beginning and end tag. <data>...CSV goes here...</data> . Of course, the CSV between the tags is not XML,violates escaping rules, and has no defined encoding. One of the worst I ever received went like <textfile><byte value='65'><byte value='66'>.... </textfile>. Now have fun converting every element to an individual byte, then finding out the encoding of the resulting text file.