From: ser@... (Sean Russell)
Date: 2002-03-23T11:09:06+09:00
Subject: ANN: REXML 2.0.1

The first upgrade to 2.0 is out.  This brings fixes for Unicode vs.
ISO-8895-1, among other things.  All youse who've been (rightly)
complaining about umlauts screwing up parsing: here's your fix.

Here's the changelog:

2.0.1: Added some unit tests, and fixed a namespace XPath bug WRT
attribute default NS's. Unicode support was screwing up 8-bit ASCII
support; chars between 0xF0 and 0xFD were getting munged. This has
been fixed, at the cost of a small amount of speed. Optimized the
descendant axes of XPath; it should be significantly faster for '//'
and other descendant operations. Added several user contributed unit
tests. Re-added QuickPath, the old, non-fully-XPath compliant, yet
much faster, XPath processor. Everything is being converted to UTF8
now, and the XML declaration reflects this. See the bugs section for
more information.

I'd like to add a couple of comments: first, if anybody wants to hack
on the tutorial, feel free, and send me the changes.  It needs
updating, and I don't know when I'll be able to get to it.

Second, the XML spec says that XML parsers MUST accept UTF8 and UTF16;
it doesn't say /anything/ about having to accept ISO-8859-1, or any
other format for that matter.  If you're writing ISO-8859-1 encoded
XML and using those upper 8-bit characters, keep in mind that,
according to the XML spec, ISO-8859-x is obsolete, and isn't required
to be supported.  Also keep in mind that if you are using ASCII and
use those characters above 0x80, you MUST declare your encoding in
your XML declaration.  The XML spec says so.  Plain 7-bit ASCII is the
same as UTF-8, so no declarations are required for those documents.