XML News from Monday, April 18, 2005

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.3.9. I'm very hesitant to install this update (available through System Update) because it seems to be breaking Java left and right. Many Java developers and end users of Java applications such as Limewire are reporting core dumps and kernel panics after installing this update. (Reinstalling Security Update 2005-002 may fix the problem.) Nonetheless, there is one new feature in this update that's of intertest to XML developers. 10.3.9 updates the Safari web browser to 1.3 which, among other new features, finally adds support for client-side XSLT. The XSLT engine is the Gnome Project's libxslt. Now if we could just get Opera and Lynx under the XSLT tent, we could finally start publishing XML+XSLT on the Web.


The Mozilla Project has released version 1.0.3 of Firefox, the open source web browser that is rapidly gaining on Internet Explorer. Firefox supports HTML, XHTML, CSS, and XSLT. MathML and SVG aren't supported out of the box, but can be added. 1.0.3 is a security update that is recommended for all users. They've also released version 1.7.7 of the integrated Mozilla suite with the same fixes.


Toni Uusitalo has posted Parsifal 0.9.2, a minimal, non-validating XML parser written in ANSI C. The API is based on SAX2. Version 0.9.2 is a bug fix release. Parsifal is in the public domain.