If a JNLP file contains a comment with a double hyphen between the beginning ("<!--") and end ("-->") delimeters of the comment, the XML parser will accept the file and skip over the entire comment. However, according to the XML standard this is incorrect:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-comments

Specifically, the sentence "For compatibility, the string "--" (double-hyphen) MUST NOT occur within comments..." applies here. On the Mac this is a problem because we use the OS call CFXMLTreeCreateFromDataWithError when building a bundled application from the JNLP file, and it fails to parse the file because of the illegal comment in the file.

This was reported by a developer as a bug on Mac OS X's Java because 'it works on other platforms', but the root problem is incorrect behavior in the shared code (see com.sun.deploy.xml.XMLParser.skipXMLComment())