The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome

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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, VxWorks, ...)

Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup languages:

the XML standard: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml
Namespaces in XML: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/
XML Base: http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/
RFC 2396 : Uniform Resource Identifiers http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath
HTML4 parser: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr
XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/
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: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html
Canonical XML Version 1.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n
Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html
W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes REC 02 May 2001
W3C xml:id Working Draft 7 April 2004

In most cases libxml2 tries to implement the specifications in a relatively strictly compliant way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passed 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/ the document model, but 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 SAX2 like interface and a minimal SAX1 implementation compatible with early expat versions

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:

the libxslt page providing an implementation of XSLT 1.0 and common extensions like EXSLT for libxml2
the gdome2 page : a standard DOM2 implementation for libxml2
the XMLSec page: an implementation of W3C XML Digital Signature for libxml2
also check the related links section for more related and active projects.

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