Daniel Veillard recently announced libxml 2.6.0, a major revision release of libxml. He's now announced a bugfix release, libxml 2.6.1, as well as libxslt 1.0.33.

The libxml site provides pages summarizing libxml2 changes and libxslt changes, listing changes release-by-release. A complete libxml2 changelog and a complete libxslt changelog are also available.

About libxml2 and libxslt

libxml2 and libxslt have become de facto standard XML-processing libraries around which an ever-increasing number of developers seem to be building their XML applications.

Both libraries:

• are written in portable C, "sticking closely to ANSI C/POSIX for easy embedding"
• in addition to being complete implementions of the core XML and XSLT specs, support a wide range of XML-related technologies, including:
  • Relax NG
  • XInclude
  • XML Catalogs (and Oasis SGML catalogs)
  • XPointer
  • EXSLT
  • W3C XML Schema
  ...and more
• include bindings for many other programming languages, including Python, C++, Perl, PHP, Tcl, Ruby, and Java
• have well-documented, stable APIs
• are very actively maintained -- Veillard responds very quickly to bug reports he receives, and he welcomes patches (releases typically include a number of changes incorporated from patches submitted by other developers)
• have been shown, through benchmark testing and widespread actual use, to be among the fastest full-featured XML-parsing and XSLT-transformation solutions currently available
• are available as packages for many Linux distributions and for the Cygwin environment, and as pre-compiled binaries for a number of other platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris (and if you want to run them on a platform for which packages or pre-compiled binaries are not available, you can easily compile and build them from source)
• are bundled with a command-line XML parser, xmllint (built on top of libxml2) and a command-line XSLT engine, xsltproc (built on top of libxslt) that are also among the fastest and most fully-featured applications in their class