>2. A sequence of 8 bits is called a byte. 3. Thus, an XML file is a
sequence of bytes.
This raises the interesting if somewhat academic question of what XML
would look like on a machine architecture using bytes or characters of a
length other than 8 bits.
As far as I can see, it would be entirely conformant to use an encoding
in which each Unicode character is mapped to a sequence of one or more
13-bit bytes. The only slight problem is that an XML parser that
understands this encoding would not be conformant unless it also
understood UTF-8 and UTF-16; and it's not entirely clear to me how UTF-8
and UTF-16 would look when stored on a machine with a 13-bit byte length.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
