However, I don??™t, because versions of Internet Explorer before version 7
take one look at the XML declaration, recoil in horror, and then spit out your site in a way
rather different from how you intended (the playfully-referred-to quirks mode discussed
earlier).
For an overview of character sets, see the following URLs: www.w3.org/
International/O-charset.html, www.w3.org/International/O-charset-lang.html,
and www.w3.org/International/O-charset-list.html.
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34
Of course, Internet Explorer 6??™s share of the market is in decline, but it??™s likely to take at
least a couple of years from Internet Explorer 7??™s release for its predecessor to become
extinct. Therefore, because the XML declaration has the potential to cause havoc with a
fair chunk of your likely audience, it??™s cause for concern. However, as mentioned earlier,
there??™s an alternative, compliant, totally safe option that you can use instead:
Using the preceding meta tag works fine, it does the same job as one of the main roles of
the XML declaration (stating the page??™s character encoding), and no browsers choke on it.
The net result is that everyone goes home happy, and we can finally start talking about the
next part of a web page.
The head section
The head section of a web page contains information about the document, the majority of
which is invisible to the end user.
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