RE: [xml-dev] Parse Error - Invalid Character

["Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

> I've really been surprised at all the places that Microsoft is either
> non-conforming or simply does things in a way that can be unworkable
in

In this case I would argue that the situation is likely that Microsoft
*was* non-conforming, and is now conforming.  For starters, I am betting
that the TM symbol was 0x99, which was an "enhancement" to ISO-8859-1
that was only available in the Microsoft version of ISO-8859-1.  This is
why it showed up as a ? in the e-mail and notepad -- 0x99 is not defined
in any of the Unicode fonts.  You would have to be using a really old
version of Windows or else some old program using the "Windows: Western"
character set to get that character.

Regarding the *blindly* downloaded then encoded as utf-8, I'm not sure
what the issue here is.  I'm pretty certain that all of our parsers
encode the XML as utf-16 internally.  And regardless, that shouldn't
have a bearing on this problem.  When *outputting* XML, ASP will
automatically convert from utf-16 to utf-8, or to whatever codepage
directive is set to.  This is all configurable.

> certain situations.  I've seen in in .NET web services, 

Do you have a specific conformance bug in ".NET web services" you would
like to report?

> and SQL server querying an xml file for query parameters, and now
this.

Regarding SQL server querying an xml file for query parameters, I am
guessing you are talking about SQLXML and URL-encoded templates or
parameters that include XML?  In this case, we actually *are*
conforming, although it is easy to get confused.  The issue is that the
URL escaping rules are different than XML escaping rules.  Embedding XML
as a string in a URL involves escaping the XML using URLEncoding instead
of XML encoding.  And in fact, following the specs in this way turns out
to be the only way that things work when you get to some of the boundary
cases.