# The XML C library for Gnome ## libxml

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Libxml is the XML C library developped 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 "markup" information enclosed between angle bracket. HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C a variety of language binding makes it available in other environments. 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/ most of 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-8859-1], rfc2044 [UTF-8] and rfc2781 [UTF-16] core encodings 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 In most cases libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively strict way. As of release 2.4.16, libxml2 passes all 1800+ tests from the OASIS XML Tests Suite. To some extent libxml2 provide some support for the following other specification but don't claim to implement them: Document Object Model (DOM) http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/ it doesn't implement the API itself, gdome2 does this in top of libxml2 RFC 959 : libxml 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 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, MacOsX, RISC Os, OS/2, VMS, QNX, MVS, ...) 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 Daniel Veillard