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Okay, forget XML for a moment, let's just look at marc 'binary'. First, for Anglophone-centric MARC21. The LC docs don't actually say quite what I thought about leader byte 09, used to advertise encoding: a - UCS/Unicode Character coding in the record makes use of characters from the Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) (ISO 10646), or Unicode™, an industry subset. That doesn't say UTF-8. It says UCS or "Unicode". What does that actually mean? Does it mean UTF-8, or does it mean UTF-16 (closer to what used to be called "UCS" I think?). Whatever it actually means, do people violate it in the wild? Now we get to non-Anglophone centric marc. I think all of which is ISO_2709? A standard which of course is not open access, so I can't get it to see what it says. But leader 09 being used for encoding -- is that Marc21 specific, or is it true of any ISO-2709? Marc8 and "unicode" being the only valid encodings can't be true of any ISO-2709, right? Is there a generic ISO-2709 way to deal with this, or not so much?