There's a suggestion on the Atom issue list to dictate the way clients determine the character encoding of feeds retrieved over HTTP. Most clients to date have used a lax method to allow as many feeds as possible to be internally parsed. Truth is, that character encoding should be determined using RFC 3023, but many Web developers believe this RFC to be broken.
Atom Wiki: RFC 3023 defines rules for determining the character encoding of a feed (or any other XML document served over HTTP). The default configuration for most web servers is to serve ".xml" files as "text/xml" with no charset parameter. According to RFC 3023, all of these feeds MUST be parsed as "us-ascii". This is nonintuitive and unacceptable for UnprivilegedUsers, who are left without a way to publish Atom feeds in any other encoding.
I don't entirely agree w/ the suggestions on the Atom Wiki, but I agree w/ the motivation. The motivation is to help users who have no choice but to serve their feeds as "text/xml". Redefining new rules because we disagree w/ them only means that existing tools that support RFC 3023 will not be fully useful.
