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The xml-stylesheet Instruction

Syntax Attributes Examples Differences

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The xml Declaration

The xml declaration in HTML 5

The xml declaration is the first line of code and indicates that the content is a HTML document.

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<?xml?> Declaration Syntax

Syntax of the <?xml?> declaration

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Attributes of the xml Declaration

Attributes of the xml declaration

version attribute
The version attribute is coded as version="1.0", which indicates the document follows the XML version 1.0 syntax. The document should be coded to be "well-formed", even if it is not an entirely "valid" HTML document.
encoding attribute
The encoding attribute indicates what character encoding has been used to encode the HTML document as a file or byte input stream. Most importantly, among other things, this determines how many bytes of raw data are consumed to compose each character of the decoded document.

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HTML 5 Examples

Examples of the xml declaration in HTML 5

The xml declaration appears at the very beginning of an HTML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/site-template.xsl"?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
...
</html>

It is recommended that the encoding be specified using the preferred (MIME) name as specified in the IANA 's Official Names for Character Sets. Some examples:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="EUC-JP"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-10646-UCS-2"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-10646-UCS-4"?>

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Changes in HTML 5

What's new in HTML 5

Differences between HTML 5 and earlier versions

The xml declaration does not appear in HTML documents conforming to the 1997 HTML version 4 standard. For 2000 and later XHTML 1.x documents, the xml declaration was optional. For HTML version 5 documents, it's use is highly recommended.

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Last updated Sunday September 19, 2010

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xml Declaration

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