XML News from Saturday, August 14, 2004

John Cowan has updated TagSoup, his Java-language SAX parser for nasty, ugly HTML, to version 0.9.7. This is a bug fix release that improves compatibility with XOM. "In addition, the new 'bogons-empty' feature lets you control whether a non-HTML element gets a content model of EMPTY (as previously) or ANY." (Actually I think he did this in 0.9.6, but I never got an announcnement about that version.)


Eric S. Raymond has released version 1.13 of doclifter, an open source tool that transcodes {n,t,g}roff documentation to DocBook. He claims the "result is usable without further hand-hacking about 95% of the time." This release fixes bugs. Doclifter is written in Python, and requires Python 2.2a1. doclifter is published under the GPL.


Tatu Saloranta has posted WoodStox 0.9, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) XML processor written in Java, that implements StAX API. "StAX specifies interface for standard J2ME 'pull-parsers' (as opposed to "push parser" like SAX API ones); at high-level StAX specifies 2 types (iterator and event based) readers and writers that used to access and output XML documents."


Apple has released Safari 1.0.3 for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, a web browser based on the KHTML rendering engine. Safari supports direct display of XML documents with CSS stylesheets but does not support XSLT. This release, "improves the Safari rendering engine to expand 3rd party application support and delivers the latest security enhancements." You can get it throiugh Software Update or download it from Apple's web site. I'm glad to see Apple hasn't completely abandoned users on not quite the latest release of their operating system. I just wish the same was true for their Java development team.