Clark Cooper has announced the release of XML::Parser 2.28 to CPAN, indicating that this will be the last in the 2.x series of the module.

The 3.x series of XML::Parser will involve some "major structural changes", on which Cooper said he will comment soon.

Version 2.28 includes the following changes:

• Extensive patches to expat to allow fixing of buggy declaration parsing
• Addition of a XML::Parser::ContentModel class, now received by element declaration handlers instead of a string
• Doctype declaration handler is called prior to parsing the internal or external subset of DTD declarations
• "DoctypeFin" handler, called at the end of processing the DOCTYPE declaration

Also included are patches from Larry Wall that makes UTF-8 output play nicely with the recently released Perl 5.6.