Example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
Declaration requirement:
- The XML declaration starts with the characters <?xml and ends with the characters ?>.
- If you include a declaration, you must include the version, but the encoding and standalone attributes are optional.
- The version, encoding, and standalone attributes must be in that order.
- The version should be 1.0 or 1.1, as outlined below.
- The XML declaration must be right at the beginning of the file. That is, the first character in the file should be that <; no line breaks or spaces. Some parsers are more forgiving about this than others.
Encoding
If no encoding is specified, UTF-8 or UTF-16 is assumed.
ISO-8859-1 is the 8 bit ASCII character code.
standalone
yes - specifies that the document exists entirely on its own, without depending on any other files
no - indicates that the document may depend on an external DTD