Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project (but usable outside of the Gnome platform).

XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using extra "markup" information enclosed between angle brackets.

HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C a variety of language bindings make it available in other environments.

Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Mac OS X, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, Windows, CygWin, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)

Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup languages:
· The XML standard
· Namespaces in XML
· XML Base
· RFC 2396: Uniform Resource Identifiers
· XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0
· HTML4 parser
· XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0
· XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0
· ISO-8859-x encodings, as well as rfc2044 [UTF-8] and rfc2781 [UTF-16] Unicode encodings, and more if using iconv support
· part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997
· XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001
· Canonical XML Version 1.0
· Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003
· W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes REC 02 May 2001
· W3C xml:id Working Draft 7 April 2004

NOTE: LibXML2 is free software available under the terms of the MIT License.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Portability fix: fix solaris compilation problem, fix compilation if XPath is not configured in
· Bug fixes: nasty entity bug introduced in 2.7.0, restore old behaviour when saving an HTML doc with an xml dump function, HTML UTF-8 parsing bug, fix reader custom error handlers (Riccardo Scussat)
· Improvement: xmlSave options for more flexibility to save as XML/HTML/XHTML, handle leading BOM in HTML documents