autodetecting character encoding

Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation specifies ways to autodetect the
character encoding of XML documents, and this works fine for documents that
start with the four bytes 3C 3F 78 6D ("<?xm"). Maybe we need a similar
mechanism for valid HTML documents, documents that start with the four
bytes 3C 21 44 4F ("<!DO").

This would make it a lot easier to upload documents to the validator, when
the documents will have their character encoding specified via the HTTP
Content-Type field when retrieved from the server.

Darin McGrew, mcgrew@stanfordalumni.org, http://www.rahul.net/mcgrew/
    Web Design Group, darin@htmlhelp.com, http://www.HTMLHelp.com/

key ring /'kE 'ri[ng]/ n. device enabling simultaneous loss of multiple keys