XML News from Saturday, July 2, 2005

Nikolaus Gebhardt has released irrXML 1.1, a small XML parser written in C++ with its own unique API. These days I'm extremely skeptical of new parsers, especially ones that advertise speed and size benefits as irrXML does. All too often they achieve that by cutting corners on mandatory aspects of XML like well-formedness checking or the internal DTD subset. Perusing the API documentation I don't see any obvious mistakes. The API appears to be missing support for comments and processing instructions, but that's not illegal as long as these are parsed correctly. More serioulsy, the API doesn't appear to have any namespace support, so this would tend to rule out irrXML for general purpose XML processing.