Sun has posted the first public review draft specification of the Java API for XML Processing 1.3. New features in this release include:
javax.xml.Version class for getting information about
the implementationjavax.xml.validation package for schema-language agnostic validation.SecureProcessing class that sets limits on entity expansion and
maximum node occurrences in schemas. XMLConstants class that provides various common namespace URIsXMLUtils class for checking XML names
There's some interesting new stuff here. However, a lot of old rough edges have not yet been smoothed out. For instance, under the description of DOMSource, we read, "The model of
how the Transformer deals with the DOM tree in terms of mismatches with the
XSLT data model or
other data models is beyond the scope of this document." This is exactly the sort of problem the spec needs to address head on if true interoperability between different implementations is to be possible.
The spec itself is written in DocBook. It's published more openly on java.net,
as well the usual license encumbered publication in the Java Community Process.