Microsoft Unveils Latest Version of XML Parser Technology Preview

REDMOND, Wash., May 17, 2000 — Furthering its commitment to the support and promotion of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Extensible Markup Language (XML), Microsoft Corp. today announced the newest version of its MSXML parser with built-in support for version 2.0 of the Simple API for XML (SAX2). The decision to implement the SAX2 programming interface, rather than develop a new one, is a reflection of Microsoft’s commitment to deliver the features its customers demand. SAX2 is designed to enable faster and more efficient processing of XML by allowing programs to read, review and process XML files without having to load the entire document into memory.

The latest version of the MSXML parser, the third in a series of XML parser technology previews Microsoft began releasing in January 2000, provides another programming interface for building Web-based distributed applications based on standard XML messages. These releases allow Microsoft to achieve its goal of providing new features and updated support for standards in
“Web time.”
In addition to the new SAX2 support, this release also adds more support for XSLT and Xpath.

“The W3C’s DOM is the only official standard API for working with XML, but programmers have been looking for a faster, more efficient way of working with XML documents. SAX2 provides that mechanism,”
said David Turner, product manager at Microsoft.
“Microsoft has recognized the need to support developer-based initiatives, and SAX2 has proved to be a very useful and effective tool in this community.”

The DOM (Document Object Model) specification is useful for working with data in memory, especially when querying, transforming or building new data structures, but it can be inefficient when dealing with either large numbers of documents or very large documents. SAX2 offers a more efficient solution for these scenarios because it provides an interface that enables developers to process a document without loading all of it into memory.

Development of SAX began in December 1997; its first release was in May 1998. SAX was a collaborative effort developed entirely by the members of the XML-DEV mailing list. The SAX interface is free for commercial and noncommercial use. Although the list of contributors credits over 80 people, including some of the original developers of XML, David Megginson of Megginson Technologies Ltd. ( http://www.megginson.com/ ) is considered to be the primary developer and maintainer of SAX. SAX 2.0 was released on May 5, 2000.

The new release is available for immediate download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/ .

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.

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