intertwingly

It’s just data

HTML charset vs XML encoding


Dare Obasanjo: Mark Pilgrim has a post entitled Determining the character encoding of a feed where he does good job of sumarizing what the various specs say about determining the character encoding of an XML document retrieved on the World Wide Web via HTTP. The only problem with his post is that although it is a fairly accurate description of what the specs say it definitely does not reflect reality.

OK, so given this, what should a feedvalidator do?  Should it follow the specifications?  Should it follow Dare's recommendations?  Should it issue a warning if the specifications and Dare's recommendations differ for a given feed?