In article <4Z0Md.51$tX4.47@n...>,
EU citizen <noaddress@f...> wrote:

>> > Do web pages have to be created in unicode in order to use UTF-8
>encoding?

>> That's kind of a silly question because UTF-8 is a unicode encoding.

>I wish people would give simple answers to simple questions.

It may be a simple question for you, because you know what you mean,
but for the  rest of us it's a hard-to-understand question, because
if you use UTF-8, you are inevitably using Unicode, since it's a
way of writing Unicode.

But from what you say now, it looks as if your question is really
about some Windows software.

>To let your XML parser understand these characters, you should save your XML
>documents as Unicode.
>Windows 95/98 Notepad cannot save files in Unicode format.
>You can use Notepad to edit and save XML documents that contain foreign
>characters (like Norwegian or French æøå and êèé),
>But if you save the file and open it with IE 5.0, you will get an ERROR
>MESSAGE.

Presumably this means that Notepad saves documents containing those
characters in some non-Unicode encoding, in which case you must put
an appropriate encoding declaration at the top of the document.  But
you will need to know the name of the encoding that Notepad uses.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="whatever-the-notepad-encoding-is"?>

>Windows 95/98 Notepad files must be saved with an encoding attribute.

This is mysterious.  What does it mean?  That Notepad won't save
them without one?  Or that you have to add one to make it work
in the web browser?

>To avoid this error you can add an encoding attribute to your XML
>declaration, but you cannot use Unicode.
>The encoding below (open it with IE 5.0), will NOT give an error message:
><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

It only makes sense to say that you're using UTF-8 if you are.  If Notepad
really  doesn't know about Unicode, this  will only be true if you
restrict yourself to ASCII characters, because they're the same
in UTF-8 as they are in ASCII and most other common encodings.

-- Richard