Header lines, declarations in skin files (1 Viewer)

[rsbrux]

I have just started poking around in skin files and am very confused by the inconsistencies in headers.
I expected every file to have something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>

but many files in various skins have no xml version declaration at all.
Also many of them have odd characters at the beginning of the first line, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>

What significance (if any) do these characters have?
I looked in vain on the Wiki for a DTD file for skin files. Does such a thing exist?
If not, wouldn't it save a lot of debugging time by allowing a supericial static analysis of skin files using popular XML authoring tools?

 

[joz]

I also noticed the same thing. I myself believe it has to do with encoding and the handling of certain editors with encoding.
It could be your editor mis-interprets the encoding of the xml file or that some editor did something wrong while saving with a encoding style or trying to transcode it or whatever.
This "" is complete crap and can be deleted.

but many files in various skins have no xml version declaration at all.

Ofcourse you could leave it out and let the interpreter take a guess. It's considered "good practice" to put in in the xml file and really should be done.