Re: charset=us-ascii mandatory?

olivier Thereaux wrote:
 
> Declaring a charset is not necessary, but without one, the validator
> will fall back to utf-8. (which includes us-ascii).

For text/xml it uses ASCII as default (as it should).
 
>> Isn't "us-ascii" the default value for "charset"?
 
> utf-8 is.

Is it ?  For older versions I'm not sure, apparently
RFC 2070 says the default depends on the protocol used
to fetch the document:  Latin-1 as default for http,
ASCII as default for mail, no default for ftp, etc.

The document character set used to be "Unicode" for 
RFC 2070, apparently after Latin-1 for HTML 2.

Jukka's proposal to use windows-1252 as ersatz-default
might work in many cases (including those cases where
the real charset is certainly NOT windows-1252).  But 
I think UTF-8 is better because it's almost impossible
to get an unintentional match with something else.

Frank