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 ]

· Features: 480323 add code to plug in ICU converters by default (Giuseppe Iuculano), Add xmlSaveOption XML_SAVE_WSNONSIG (Adam Spragg)
· Documentation: Fix devhelp documentation installation (Mike Hommey), Fix web site encoding problems (Daniel Veillard), Fix a couple of typo in HTML parser error messages (Michael Day), Forgot to update the news page for 0.7.7 (Daniel Veillard)
· Portability: 607273 Fix python detection on MSys/Windows (LRN), 614087 Fix Socket API usage to allow Windows64 compilation (Ozkan Sezer), Fix compilation with Clang (Koop Mast), Fix Win32 build (Rob Richards)
· Bug Fixes: 595789 fix a remaining potential Solaris problem (Daniel Veillard), 617468 fix progressive HTML parsing with style using "'" (Denis Pauk), 616478 Fix xmllint shell write command (Gwenn Kahz), 614005 Possible erroneous HTML parsing on unterminated script (Pierre Belzile), 627987 Fix XSD IDC errors in imported schemas (Jim Panetta), 629325 XPath rounding errors first cleanup (Phil Shafer), 630140 fi...