The XML parser conforms to the language as defined by W3C. The parser accepts source files encoded in ISO-8859-x, UTF-8 and UTF-16. The parser does build a syntax tree.
References
Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, W3C Recommendation, 10 February 1998, http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210