XML encoding

The default XML encoding is UTF-8. Which is a Unicode standard. I know that MacOS X is fully Unicode compliant, and MacOS 9 is not. Also I think that Windows is not Unicode compliant. If I deploy my XML pages encoded with the default UTF-8 will operating systems that do not implement Unicode be able to view my pages? Is it the job of the parser to be able to decode Unicode and display it accurately on the host OS? Right now all of my pages are in English only, but I feel compelled to encode all my pages in Unicode as sometime in the future I plan, or would at least hope to, add content that is in a foreign language to my pages.

Although I don't know how far back the support goes in OS versions, Unicode output works just fine in the Windows browsers that I've tried. Certainly IE 5+ and Netscape 4.7.

I'm using the Microsoft MSXML to generate pages that are UTF-8 and haven't run into any viewing problems yet. I also suspect that Mac OS 9 browsers will also work just fine, but haven't test this yet.

I think there's a difference between whether the browsers can correctly display Unicode vs. OS compliance.