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Actually there is a problem with the charset stuff in the XML-RPC spec. Or not in the spec, but in the implementations of the company whose former CEO created the spec (was that diplomatic enough?  ). The problem is in the fact that almost all Userland software abuses the spec in the way that they don't give correct charset encodings in XML-RPC stuff.
They send ISO-8859-1 chars without declaring the XML stuff as ISO-8859-1 - this doesn't validate (XML charset by default is UTF-8 and many 8bit chars are not valid prefix codes in UTF-8), so you have to patch headers and parsers to communicate with Userland software (RCS or Radio), as the results from RCS or the requests and results from Radio (I am on the receiving side of Radio if I work on the Python Community Server) won't be allowed by validating XML parsers.
I don't speak of the chars that are not in ISO-8859-1 that are sent out by Radio from time to time (for example the smart quotes in error messages when you access non-existant methods on a Mac Radio installation), as that would be annoying but unproblematic if the stuff was declared as ISO-8859-1 - the parser would take it, it would just look funny.
Why do I care about this? Usually I don't do comment stuff on this blog. So why on this one? Simple reason: it makes the life of programmers unnecessary hard. Usual toolkits to do XML parsing need correct and valid XML to work, otherwise they barf (many toolkits are built around the excellent and fast expat parser).
So it would be nice if Userland would live up to the specs their former CEO built and would lead a way of technical excellence in the implementation of those specs.
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