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"Programming
with libxml2 is like the thrilling embrace of an exotic stranger."
Mark
Pilgrim
Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project
(but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available
under the
MIT
License
. 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 (Linux, Unix, Windows,
CygWin, MacOS, MacOS X, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...)
Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup
languages:
In most cases libxml2 tries to implement the specifications in a
relatively strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all
1800+ tests from the
OASIS XML Tests
Suite
.
To some extent libxml2 provides support for the following additional
specifications but doesn't claim to implement them completely:
- Document Object Model (DOM)
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/
it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this on top of
libxml2
- RFC 959
:
libxml2 implements a basic FTP client code
- RFC 1945
:
HTTP/1.0, again a basic HTTP client code
- SAX: a minimal SAX implementation compatible with early expat
versions
- DocBook SGML v4: libxml2 includes a hackish parser to transition to
XML
A partial implementation of
XML Schemas Part
1: Structure
is being worked on but it would be far too early to make any
conformance statement about it at the moment.
Separate documents:
Logo designed by
Marc Liyanage
.
Daniel Veillard
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