James Clark, author of the well-known XML parser expat, has announced version 1.2, the final production release before he hands over maintenance of the software.

Expat 1.2 contains several improvements over expat 1.1:

• adds support for parsing external DTDs and parameter entities
• fixes a number of bugs
• now available under the MIT license, as opposed to the less permissive MPL/GPL license under which it was previously available

Expat will now move towards version 2.0, under the care of a team of developers led by Clark Cooper, the maintainer of the Perl expat binding, XML::Parser. One primary goal of the new expat will be a shared library version under Unix.

Beta versions of the new expat are already available at the project's home at SourceForge. Cooper has used this version in his recently released XML::Parser 2.30 Perl module, now available from CPAN.