> As an advice I hope you do not take as insult, saying
> "in section {section} the spec says {argument}" 
> is much more constructive than 
> "read the spec on that", "{extremely_obvious_link}",
> at least to people not familiar with the spec and asking for the source > of your arguments (msg196360). Can shorten threads, too.

No harm done. The reason why I just posted the spec URL is that it's actually the entire spec that backs the argument. XML is (essentially) specified as a mapping from a sequence of bytes to a hierarchical structure (and back again). That's why there is an XML declaration header that names the encoding, for example. It wouldn't be needed if XML was defined as Unicode data.