content: This was my first thought too, but then I saw some of the links in the article: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i-correctly-pass-the-string-null-an-employees-proper-surname-to-a-so It seems like there are some strange bugs in XML parsing that causes this? I'm not really sure Edit: This seems to be the main point:  When currentChild.appendChild is passed the string "null", it first converts it to a root XML element with text null, and then tests that element against the null literal. This is a weak equality test, so either the XML containing null is coerced to the null type, or the null type is coerced to a root xml element containing the string "null", and the test passes where it arguably should fail. One fix might be to always use strict equality tests when checking XML (or anything, really) for "nullness."  One more strike against weak equality tests (: Edit2: Plot Twist: it seems like all the links in the article are referring to the same SO post, so maybe this issue isn't that common? It does seem asinine to do weak comparison with names anyway IMHO. Also Bank of America system keeps dropping his name, which would get annoying, but is really just one more system getting tripped up.