Note that the the serialization library does throw exceptions on failure. These exceptions are documented in the manual. You should be able to catch these exceptions in your own save/load functions. I can't say to what extent one might be able to recover. Implementing this would likely require more elaborat save/load functions.
Yes, I know it throws exceptions that I can catch, but the question is
how the library would behave in the following case.
Consider the following xml small item:
<item class_id="2" tracking_level="0" version="1">
<px class_id="3" tracking_level="1" version="0" object_id="_0">