Daniel Veillard has released new versions of libxml2 and libxslt, classifying the libxml2 release as a "major bugfix release", and writing that libxml2 2.5.9 and 2.5.10 "include a lot of bugfixes spanning the whole library; upgrading is strongly recommended." The libxslt 1.0.32 release is also significant in that it is the first to include Python bindings for extension elements.

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