Microsoft has announced the release of a technology preview 'Beta 2' version of MSXML Parser 4.0, offering "a faster SAX and XSLT, complete XSD," and other enhancements. "The July 2001 release of the Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 4.0 Technology Preview is a preliminary release of MSXML 4.0. This technology preview has a number of improvements compared to the April release: (1) XSD validation with SAX; (2) XSD validation with DOM, using the schemaLocation attribute; (3) Schema Object Model (SOM) to access schema information in DOM and SAX; (4) Substantially faster XSLT engine -- tests show about x4, and for some scenarios x8, acceleration, except the known serious performance bug for xsl:keys; (5) New and substantially faster SAX parser, which is also available in DOM with the NewParser property -- use dom.setProperty('NewParser', true); (6) Old, non-conformant technologies are removed: Old XSL with XSLPattern; uuid namespaces for XDR; proprietary XmlParser object; normalize-line-breaks property in SAX. Corresponding standard technologies [XSLT 1.0, XPath 1.0, http-based namespaces for XDR, SAX2] have been available since MSXML 3.0; (7) True side-by-side functionality, which ensures that MSXML 4.0 can work without any collision with previous or future versions of MSXML. As a result, replace mode is removed completely. XmlInst.exe will not work with this release. Version-independent ProgIDs, such as DOMDOcument, are also removed. You should use DOMDOcument.4.0 to get 4.0 functionality. The release uses Windows Installer 2.0."