As aside effect the mistaken content BUGS According to the W3C standard, an XML file without a declaration at the beginning is not considered well-formed. However, xmlwf allows this to pass. disappears from the man page. This is related to bug 470 https://sourceforge.net/p/expat/bugs/470/ or https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=412786 in Debian.