The new September 2000 Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) Beta Release is available with a complete implementation of XPath/XSLT, "server-safe" HTTP access, and changes to the SAX2 implementation.

The September MSXML 3.0 beta release is an update of the previous (July) beta release and can be installed to run side by side with older (pre 3.0) MSXML releases.

According to the "What's New" document, the parser contains a complete implementation of XPath/XSLT 1.0, including support for the xsl:decimal-format element and the unparsed-entity-uri() and format-number() XPath functions.

Conformance appears to be the key word for this new release. The new SAX2 parser is said to be 98.5 percent conformant with the OASIS test suite and Microsoft has even removed the implicit conversion from result tree fragments to node sets just to be compliant with the XSLT 1.0 specification. (This conversion, available in earlier releases and part of the XSLT 1.1 requirements, now must be explicitly performed using the msxml:node-set extension function.)

Other features include "server-safe" HTTP access, new namespace support when querying the DOM using XPath expressions, SAX2 support through a single library that can be used with both C++ and Visual Basic, and "a number of bug fixes and performance improvements".

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