No, it’s not OK. Appendix F of the XML spec says: Because each XML entity not accompanied by external encoding information and not in UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding must begin with an XML encoding declaration, in which the first characters must be ‘< ?xml’, any conforming processor can detect, after two to four octets of … Read more
For HTML5, the correct DOCTYPE declaration is <!DOCTYPE html> It is needed to specify full standards mode to the browser. What you’ve shown, <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?> is an XML declaration. It is optional for XML 1.0 and required for XML 1.1, but XML 1.1 isn’t in widespread use. version=”1.0″ and encoding=”utf-8″ are the defaults anyway. … Read more
To put this all together – this works perfectly for me: // To Clean XML public string SerializeToString<T>(T value) { var emptyNamespaces = new XmlSerializerNamespaces(new[] { XmlQualifiedName.Empty }); var serializer = new XmlSerializer(value.GetType()); var settings = new XmlWriterSettings(); settings.Indent = true; settings.OmitXmlDeclaration = true; using (var stream = new StringWriter()) using (var writer = XmlWriter.Create(stream, … Read more
To understand the “encoding” attribute, you have to understand the difference between bytes and characters. Think of bytes as numbers between 0 and 255, whereas characters are things like “a”, “1” and “Ä”. The set of all characters that are available is called a character set. Each character has a sequence of one or more … Read more
In XML 1.0, the XML Declaration is optional. See section 2.8 of the XML 1.0 Recommendation, where it says it “should” be used — which means it is recommended, but not mandatory. In XML 1.1, however, the declaration is mandatory. See section 2.8 of the XML 1.1 Recommendation, where it says “MUST” be used. It … Read more