Re: 23.0.60; Defaut encoding for XML files should be undefined (instead of utf-8)

[Jason Rumney]

Edward O'Connor wrote:
> My understanding is that the XML specification requires XML documents
> lacking an explicit <?xml encoding='foo'?> instruction to be UTF-8 or
> UTF-16, so Emacs does the right thing already.
>   

Emacs goes beyond doing the right thing at the moment. The right thing 
would be to guide users into using utf-8 by making that the default 
encoding for *new* XML files, and perhaps warning if an existing file 
was detected as non-utf-8 without a charset declaration in the header. 
Forcing users into using utf-8 by ignoring explicit requests to save the 
file as latin-1 and by opening latin-1 encoded files as utf-8 even when 
the decoding fails is not the right behaviour. Our users are not slaves 
to specifications.