Microsoft has released an update to its MSXML package, adding SAX2 support and a variety of XSLT and XPath features, along with many bug fixes.

Perhaps the most substantial change to the parser architecture is the addition of SAX2 event-based parsing to MSXML. Eldar Musayev writes:

"SAX2, in contrast, traverses the document and informs the calling application of parsing events, such as the start or end of a new element. One of the best reasons for using SAX2 is for parsing long documents. With a SAX2 parser, for example, an application can monitor events as they occur and read into memory only the necessary parts of the document. With MSXML3.DLL, Microsoft offers a fully-compliant COM implementation (MSXML SAX2) of the SAX2 interface."

Microsoft also provides a PDF-format SAX2 COM Implementation Reference Card.

The XSLT and XPath changes add some key functionality, notably xsl:import, xsl:apply-imports, xsl:number, xsl:attribute-set, and support for the following, preceding, following sibling, and preceding sibling XPath axes.

The bug fixes appear to improve conformance to the XML 1.0, Namespaces in XML, XPath, and XSL recommendations as well as clean up some crashing situations.

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