[Python-3000] XML as bytes or unicode?

[Guido van Rossum]

2008/8/24 "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de>:
> Parsing Unicode XML strings isn't quite that meaningful.

Maybe not according to the XML standard, but I can see lots of
practical situations where the encoding is always known and applied by
some other layer, i.e. the I/O library or a database wrapper. Forcing
XML to be interpreted as binary isn't always the best idea. E.g.
consider storing XML in a SVN repository. Or consider storing XML
fragments in Python string literals.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)