James Clark Releases expat Version 1.2

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[October 06, 2000]   James Clark Releases expat Version 1.2.    James Clark has announced the release of expat version 1.2, now available for download from the jclark.com web site, togeher with the expat FAQ document. This version adds support for parsing external DTDs and parameter entities. Win32 executables and Win32 import libraries are included in the distribution. Clark's expat - XML Parser Toolkit is "an XML 1.0 parser written in C. It aims to be fully conforming. It is currently not a validating XML processor. Version 1.2 is a production version of expat. Compiling with -DXML_DTD enables this support. There's a new -p option for the xmlwf application which will cause it to process external DTDs and parameter entities; this implies the -x option. See the comment above XML_SetParamEntityParsing in xmlparse.h for the API addition that enables this. The directory xmlparse contains an XML parser library which is built on top of the xmltok library. The interface is documented in xmlparse/xmlparse.h. The directory sample contains a simple example program using this interface; sample/build.bat is a batch file to build the example using Visual C++. The directory xmlwf contains the xmlwf application, which uses the xmlparse library. The arguments to xmlwf are one or more files which are each to be checked for well-formedness. An option -d dir can be specified; for each well-formed input file the corresponding canonical XML will be written to dir/f, where 'f' is the filename (without any path) of the input file. An -x option will cause references to external general entities to be processed. An -s option will make documents that are not standalone cause an error (a document is considered standalone if either it is intrinsically standalone because it has no external subset and no references to parameter entities in the internal subset or it is declared as standalone in the XML declaration)." Version 1.2 of expat is now available under a more permissive license (the MIT license rather than the MPL/GPL). James Clark announces expat version 1.2 as his own "final major production release." He says: "I am happy to announce that I am handing over future development and maintenance of expat to a team led by Clark Cooper, hosted on sourceforge.net. Clark is working towards an expat 2.0 that adds several new features, including better support for use as a shared library under Linux and other Unix variants. A beta release is available already; see http://expat.sourceforge.net."

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Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive.

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