speedy-xml is a simple UTF-8-only XML pull reader/writer written to be compatible with (the default mode of) the RapidXML C++ library.
It is specifically not compliant with the XML specification because RapidXML is not compliant with the specification, if RapidXML exhibits some weird behaviour speedy-xml should do so too (although see prefixed name exception below).
Unlike RapidXML, this library contains only a pull-based reader that emits events, it does not parse the XML directly into a tree. This is because constructing a tree from these events is relatively trivial and some parsers may choose to work directly on the XML events for performance, easier location-tracking and/or simplicity.
speedy-xml, while it tries its best to be compliant, deviates from RapidXML in a few ways. One of them is the addition of prefixed names, speedy-xml splits names of the form prefix:name into prefix and name components, this means that it will reject names of the form a:b:c.