The dom4j 1.6.1 HTMLWriter is missing an XML declaration even if set to XHTML mode.It is fixed by changing back to XMLWriter but then I'm missing all the HTML features.\[code\] import org.dom4j.Document; import org.dom4j.DocumentHelper; import org.dom4j.Element; import org.dom4j.io.HTMLWriter; import org.dom4j.iutputFormat; import org.dom4j.io.XMLWriter; OutputFormat format = new OutputFormat(); format.setEncoding("UTF-8"); format.setXHTML(true); format.setOmitEncoding(false); format.setSuppressDeclaration(false); HTMLWriter writer = null; try { writer = new HTMLWriter(format); } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e1) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e1.printStackTrace(); } try { writer.write(createDocument()); writer.flush(); } catch (IOException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); }\[/code\]