In article <Pt7Md.456$al3.208@n...>,
EU citizen <noaddress@f...> wrote:
>Through experimentation with the W3C HTML vakidator, I've worked
>out that iso-8859-1will work for Notepad files with standard english text
>plus acute accented vowels.

Beware that Microsoft uses some proprietary encodings that are ISO-8859-1
for characters A0-FF, but use the C1 controls (81-9F) for other purposes.
If you don't use any of those (and the Euro symbol is quite likely one
of them) you should be OK.

>The need for the XML encoding  statement to match the original file format
>was not mentioned in any of the (many) articles I've read on XM:/XHTML over
>the last *four* years.

In most circumstances UTF-8 is the default encoding for XML if there
is no encoding declaration.  In theory for text/* served by HTTP,
8859-1 is (or was - they may have changed it) the default.  But if you
stick to ascii, it won't matter.  And remember that you *can* stick to
ASCII and use character references (such as &#xa3;) or entity
references (if you declare them in your DTD) for all non-ascii
characters.

-- Richard