XML News from Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Version 3.1 of the payware <Oxygen/> XML editor has been released. Oxygen supports XML, XSL, DTDs, and the W3C XML Schema Language. New features in version 3.1 include:

• The Outliner shows more information.
• DocBook XSL stylesheets have been upgraded to version 1.64.1.
• File associations are supported on Mac OS X.
• WebDAV tries to recover from non fatal HTTP errors.
• Redesigned Eclipse Plugin options
• Bug fixes

Oxygen requires Java 1.3 or later. It costs $74.

The Mozilla Project has released FireFox (nee Firebird) 0.8, an open source web browser for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that supports XML, XHTML, XSL, HTML, and CSS. Unlike the heavier weight Mozilla from which it is derived, this is just abrowser; no e-mail client, newreader, LDAP browser, or microwave oven is included. Besides the name change, new features in this release include

• A Windows Installer
• A new streamlined download manager
• An enhanced Add Bookmark Dialog that allows the creation of new bookmark folders.
• Offline mode
• Better Handling of mislabelled binary files
• A new XPInstall Frontend
• A new default Pinstripe theme for MacOS X

Of course, many bugs have been fixed as well. FireFox is published under the Mozilla Public License.

IBM has released Version 5.4 of XML for C++, a schema-validating XML parser based on Xerces-C. This release has a number of bug fixes and performance optimizations, especially in schema handling.

Sleepycat Software has released Berkeley DB XML 1.2.1, an open source (Non-GPL viral) "application-specific, embedded data manager for native XML data" based on Berkeley DB. It includes C++ and Java APIs and supports XPath 1.0. 1.2.1 is a bug fix release.