The encoding Declaration
The encoding attribute specifies which character set and encoding the document is written in. Sometimes this identifies an encoding of the Unicode character set such as UTF-8 and UTF-16; other times it identifies a different character set such as ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII, which for XML's purposes serves mainly as an encoding of a subset of the full Unicode character set.
The default encoding is UTF-8 if no encoding declaration or other metadata is present. UTF-16 can also be used if the document begins with a byte order mark. However, even in cases where the document is written in the UTF-8 or UTF-16 encodings, an encoding declaration helps people reading the document recognize the encoding, so it's useful to specify it ...
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