The file is not exactly corrupt, in that it contains well-formed XML that is clearly exactly what was written by Sodipodi however many years ago. The problem is that it isn't *valid* XML--it contains elements and attributes not present in the standard, and doesn't follow the protocol for extending it.
In other words, the file is not standards compliant. However, the gwenview and Konqueror renderer(s) are not compliant either. Proper behaviour for an SVG parser encountering an error is specified at: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-SVG-20010904/implnote.html#ErrorProcessing A compliant parser should be capable of opening a bad file, but will stop rendering when an error is encountered, which explains why Karbon, etc. don't blow up when presented with this monstrosity.
Trying to trace the code to find what's actually doing the parsing is giving me a headache. :( ksvg is very carefully split up internally in a way that I'm sure made sense to the authors, but is completely opaque to me.
Okay, thanks for clarifying terminology!
I added the w3 link in the bug report.
I am curious what you discover to perhaps explain side-by-side why karbon did not fail and actually rendered the image.
Darrell