It would change color in emacs if encoding="UTF16-LE" were invalid. It's hard to find the docs for it. UTF-16LE is listed here: http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.wst.xmleditor.doc.user%2Ftopics%2Fcxmlenc.html ________________________________ From: Eli Zaretskii Sent: Friday, May 17, 2019 9:26 AM To: J S Cc: 35766@debbugs.gnu.org Subject: Re: bug#35766: emacs saves utf-16 le xml files as utf-16 be > From: J S > CC: "35766@debbugs.gnu.org" <35766@debbugs.gnu.org> > Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 20:57:34 +0000 > > I should say that I'm using emacs for windows. And it's preferring saving in big endian to little endian when > this is the tag: > > This is the default, yes. "C-h C utf-16 RET" says: UTF-16 (detect endian on decoding, use big endian on encoding with BOM). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ If you want to encode in UTF-16LE, you need to tell Emacs to do this explicitly: C-x RET c utf-16le-with-signature RET C-x C-s > Try saving this xml file and opening it again: > > AFAIU, encoding="UTF-16LE" is invalid in XML. If you see this documented somewhere in XML docs, please tell me where it is described.