RE: [xml-dev] Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

How might Postel's Law be applied to web services that receive XML and sends out XML? 

Here are two ways:

1. The web service is willing to receive UTF-8 XML documents containing a pseudo-BOM. The web service sends out UTF-8 XML documents without a pseudo-BOM. [1] 

2. The web service is willing to receive XML character streams with Unicode decoding errors: it processes the character stream by replacing the offending bytes by the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD until it manages to resynchronize the UTF-{8,16} byte stream. The web service sends out XML documents without character decoding errors. [2] 

/Roger

[1] See Rick Jelliffe's post on the xml-dev list: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/201506/msg00065.html 

[2] See Daniel Bunzli's post on the unicode list: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2015-m06/0247.html