Re: 23.0.60; Defaut encoding for XML files should be undefined (instead of utf-8)

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Not removed, disabled (in some cases).  Specifically, if the *user* or
> some application programmer uses `prefer-coding-system' with a
> non-Unicode (non-UTF-8?) argument, he won't get the result he expects
> for some XML files.  (This is true of my proposal as well, but I'm
> proposing that XML encoding be explicitly decoupled from Mule
> guesswork, so it doesn't bother me.)
>
> In case you're forgotten, this is precisely the kind of behavior that
> distresses the OP.
>   


That's the behaviour that the OP thinks distresses him. But other 
encodings are highly unlikely to be mistaken for UTF-8, so in practice, 
pushing UTF-8 to the front of the prefer-coding-system queue is unlikely 
to distress him.

What is really distressing the OP is that UTF-8 was previously forced, 
which caused his file to load with binary non-characters in place of his 
latin-1 characters, and if he doesn't notice it and edits the file, the 
only coding system he can save as is "raw-text" (and I'm not sure 
whether the result will be recoverable once he does that).

Compounding that, is nxml-mode was ignoring the request to save as 
raw-text and forcing utf-8 again, which fails, so the changes cannot be 
saved.