The XML declaration specifies the version of XML being used. You may need to change this value for a future version of XML. It can also contain an encoding declaration and a standalone document declaration. From the pop-up menu, you can edit the declaration, and, if the document is well-formed, delete it. If you have deleted the XML declaration, you can insert one from the Insert Before item on the pop-up menu for the next item in the template.
The encoding declaration specifies the character-set encoding used in the document, such as UTF-16 or ISO-10646-UCS-4.
If there is no encoding declaration, the value defaults to UTF-16LE encoding in ASCII environments. In DBCS environments, the default is the default system encoding on the computer where the XML document is generated. This ensures that the document displays correctly as a plain text file. However, since the DBCS data is serialized to Unicode, XML documents that use UTF-16LE, UTF-16 Big Endian, or UTF-16 Little Endian can all be parsed or generated correctly on DBCS systems.
Several other encodings are available, including ASCII, UCS4 Big Endian, UCS4 Little Endian, EBCDIC code pages IBM037 and IBM1140, ISO Latin-1, and Latin 1 Windows (code page 1252). You can select these values from a drop-down list box in the XML Declaration dialog box.
The standalone document declaration specifies whether the document contains no external markup that needs to be processed and can therefore stand alone (Yes), or that there are, or might be, external markup declarations in the document (No). The value in the default template is No, and if there is no standalone document declaration, the value is assumed to be No.
This is an XML declaration that specifies XML version 1.0, UTF-16LE encoding, and that the document can stand alone:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16LE" standalone="yes"?>
