Hi Daniel,

Yes, I assume we’ll need to call it a bug… Although what BaseX is currently doing is known to us to be out of spec behavior. The function fn:parse-xml-fragments is based on our internal XML parser, which is much faster than the standard XML parser (in particular for small input), and it tolerates input that’s not perfectly well-formed. In addition, it accepts HTML entities without a linked DTD:

   parse-xml-fragment(`ä`)

We should at least document the behavior or (better) introduce a custom BaseX function for it.

Hope this helps (for now),

Christian