serializing a DOM tree writes out the Comments in the DTD

Every time I serialize a DOM Tree it also writes out the comments from the DTD. How can I prevent this from happening. I am using org.apache.xml.serialize.OutputFormat setOmitComments omits all the comments even the ones that were present in the document. Thanks  Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus -

Encoding and mystery

hello This might be a fairly simple one, but I dont know it. How does an XML reader know of the encoding of an XML before reading it - the encoding is mentioned inside the XML in the first processing instruction. One book says that if you are reading an XML accross a network(say http), then you (ha