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A bit of correspondence off-list reveals that I'm not the only person who regularly does the following: J. Random Hacker sends me a chunk of something alleged to be XML. First thing I usually do is open it up in IE. If it isn't XML, IE says so, and what the problem is, in a good and effective way. If it is, I get that nice prettyprinted display so I can get a feel for the data. For this app, this IE6 character-handling bug is particularly horrible. It isn't a corner case. For a programmer generating XML in C or Java or whatever, one of the easiest and most common mistakes to make [of course *I've* never done this :)] is to screw up and get bogus character data in the output stream. One of the nice side-effects of XML's intolerance of control characters is that this kind of screw-up very often leads to characters with values like 0 or 5 making their way into the XML, which bust well-formedness. It is guaranteed that expat or xerces or in fact a reasonably modern MSXML will properly toss such data - and a good thing too, one shudders at the thought of character data with null bytes in the bowels of much of the C-family code out there. Anyhow, Microsoft REALLY SHOULD FIX this one PDQ. It's bad. -Tim
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