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<title>The XML C library for Gnome</title>
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<h1>The XML C library for Gnome</h1>
<h2>libxml</h2>
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<li><a href="http://mail.gnome.org/archives/xml/">Mail archive</a></li>
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<li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxml2-pas/">Pascal bindings</a></li>
<li><a href="http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=libxml&product=libxml2">Bug Tracker</a></li>
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<p></p>
<p>Libxml is the XML C library developed for the Gnome project.  XML itself
is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where
semantic and structure are added to the content using extra &quot;markup&quot;
information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known
markup language. Though the library is written in C <a href="python.html">a
variety of language bindings</a> make it available in other environments.</p>
<p>Libxml2 is known to be very portable, the library should build and work
without serious troubles on a variety of systems (Linux, Unix, Windows,
CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)</p>
<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
languages:</p>
<ul>
<li>the XML standard: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a>
</li>
  <li>Namespaces in XML: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a>
</li>
  <li>XML Base: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a>
</li>
  <li>
<a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :
    Uniform Resource Identifiers <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt</a>
</li>
  <li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a>
</li>
  <li>HTML4 parser: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a>
</li>
  <li>most of XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a>
</li>
  <li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a>
</li>
  <li>[ISO-8859-1], <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]
    and <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt">rfc2781</a>
    [UTF-16] core encodings</li>
  <li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
  <li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a>
</li>
  <li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>
    and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n</a>
</li>
  <li>Relax NG Committee Specification 3 December 2001 <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html</a>
</li>
  <li>W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/">REC 02 May
    2001</a> except the base64Binary and hexBinary types</li>
</ul>
<p>In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively
strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests
from the <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xml-conformance/">OASIS XML Tests
Suite</a>.</p>
<p>To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:</p>
<ul>
<li>Document Object Model (DOM) <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/">http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/</a>
    it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of
  libxml2</li>
  <li>
<a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc959.txt">RFC 959</a> :
    libxml implements a basic FTP client code</li>
  <li>
<a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc1945.txt">RFC 1945</a> :
    HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code</li>
  <li>SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
  versions</li>
  <li>DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
  XML</li>
</ul>
<p>A partial implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-1-20010502/">XML Schemas Part
1: Structure</a> is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
conformance statement about it at the moment.</p>
<p>Separate documents:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/">the libxslt page</a> providing an
    implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for
  libxml2</li>
  <li>
<a href="http://www.cs.unibo.it/~casarini/gdome2/">the gdome2 page</a>
    : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2</li>
  <li>
<a href="http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/">the XMLSec page</a>: an
    implementation of <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/">W3C XML
    Digital Signature</a> for libxml2</li>
  <li>also check the related links section below for more related and active
    projects.</li>
</ul>
<p>Results of the <a href="http://xmlbench.sourceforge.net/results/benchmark/index.html">xmlbench
benchmark</a> on sourceforge 19 March 2003 (smaller is better):</p>
<p align="center"><img src="benchmark.gif" alt="benchmark results for Expat Xerces libxml2 Oracle and Sun toolkits"></p>
<p>Logo designed by <a href="mailto:liyanage@access.ch">Marc Liyanage</a>.</p>
<p><a href="bugs.html">Daniel Veillard</a></p>
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