8. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) application processor module of claim 2 wherein the parsed data receiver is a database system.
2. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) application processor module of claim 1 wherein the XML character stream is encoded in 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8): the parallel bit stream processor module applies the blocks of parallel property bit streams representing the bits of UTF-8 code units to a transcoder; the transcoder produces corresponding blocks of parallel property bit streams representing the bits of 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-16) code units and applies the corresponding blocks as input to the parser; and the parser processes the corresponding blocks, the character stream and the lexical items streams to form a stream of parsed XML data represented using UTF-16.