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RE: Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription

• From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• To: "xml-dev@lists.xml.org" <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
• Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2015 19:59:34 +0000

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 

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
  • Re: Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription
    • From: "Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@w3.org>
  • Re: Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>

• References:
  • Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: Heed this warning about Postel's Prescription
    • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>