>what am I missing here? surely it's legal to put any character reference in
>an XML file as long as it's correctly encoded? and if it's not, how come the
>framework serialized it for me without complaining?

Andy Fish wrote:

> I have an XML file that was created as a DOM tree in .Net 1.1 and serialized
> to disk. If I try to put character code 1 inside one of the attributes
> (don't ask why), it seems to serialize perfectly ok and I get a file that
> looks like this:
>
> <element attribute="&#1;" />
>
> which looks perfectly valid but won't open up with an XML viewer because it
> says it is an illegal character reference.
>
> what am I missing here? surely it's legal to put any character reference in
> an XML file as long as it's correctly encoded? and if it's not, how come the
> framework serialized it for me without complaining?