XML News from Saturday, November 11, 2006

The Unicode Consortium has released Unicode 5.0. Version 5 adds 1,369 new characters for Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, Latin, math, phonetic extensions, symbols, and five new scripts: Balinese, N’Ko, Phags-pa, Phoenician, and Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform. In addition it:

makes changes to guarantee case-folding stability. Unicode 5.0 incorporates all the changes introduced in Unicode 4.1, including full interoperability with the most recent versions of GB 18030, JIS X 0213, and HKSCS, and support for stable identifiers and pattern syntax characters.

Unicode 5.0 revises and improves property values and behavioral specifications in areas such as character, word, line, and sentence segmentation, and tightens conformance requirements on Bidi implementations (used for Arabic and Hebrew). The text is significantly revised for clarity and completeness, especially for Unicode conformance.

The printed book is due out a week or two, and online in February, next year. However all the data is available on the Unicode web site now.


Todd Ditchendorf has released GooeySAX 2.0, a Swing GUI wrapped around a SAX parser that allows you to check your local or remote XML documents for well-formedness, validity, or schema-validity.