This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Based on our experience, it is problematic to provide an option to specify the encoding into the query expression. Most of the time, such expressions are written in a programming environment, where the environment determines the codepage (and thus encoding) of the query expressions. Providing users the ability to set the encoding in addition can lead to a large set of unintended bugs if the code-page of the programming environment is not aligned with the user specified encoding. We therefore request either a. removal of the encoding specification b. making it optional with clear guidance when it may be useful to provide it
The encoding declaration is already specified to be optional. On May 16, 2005, the Query Working Group decided to add the following sentences to Section 4.1 of the XQuery specification in response to your comment: "The handling of an encoding declaration is implementation-dependent. If an implementation has a priori knowledge of the encoding of a query, it may use this knowledge and disregard the encoding declaration." Please let us know whether you are satisfied with this response to your comment.
This is acceptable.