title: What use is the 'encoding' in the XML header?
body: <p>Looking at the XML header</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16" standalone="no"?&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Am I right to state that the <code>encoding</code> attribute is </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>coming too late (you can't read it properly unless you know the encoding...)</li>
  <li>redundant, hence error-prone: it's all too easy to replace it with "Big5" yet save the file in UTF-8</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Or is that attribute not about the <em>content</em> of the stream?</p>
  
  <p>Am I mixing up things here?  </p>