From: ser@... (Sean Russell)
Date: 2002-04-10T10:30:41+09:00
Subject: ANN: REXML 2.1.0

I'd like to apologize to everybody on the list who have been posting
questions about REXML; I've been having to access c.l.ruby via Google
Groups, which -- while a godsend for those deprived of usenet access
-- is a perfect example of why HTML is /not/ an adequate GUI for all
applications.  In any case, I read messages on the list rarely these
days, and this probably won't change in the near future.

Please note that the API docs are now a separate download.  As I say
in the documentation, you'll do yourself a favor if you install rdoc
and generate the docs yourselves; it'll save you a download, and rdoc
is a really nice package, albeit a bit twitchy at the moment.

This release includes some IO and general speed optimizations. Parsing
large documents should be faster, and the overall package recovers
some speed lost through feature (and conformance) creep.

I've finally added support for ISO-8859-1, UNILE, and UTF-16 output. 
REXML now tries to respect the encoding (if it is one of the above, or
UTF-8), and writes out what it gets in.  You MUST always use UTF-8
internally.  You can NOT pass Element.text= or Text.new anything other
than UTF-8.  You never could, but I hadn't mentioned this in the docs,
and it has caused some people grief.

I fixed up pretty-printing a bit, and updated the tutorial a little. 
It needs more work, but it shouldn't have any glaring inconsistancies
any more.

I got a request to change the behavior of Element.attributes.each.  It
now itterates over |key,value| pairs, rather than attributes. This
seemed to be a reasonably request to me, and since there is already an
explicit each_attribute, I decided to make the change.

The unit tests have been expanded, and subsequently a number of
obscure bugs were fixed.  I love unit tests.  Heck, I'd rather write
unit tests than code these days.  Mmmmm... unit tests...

Fixed a bug in namespace handling in attributes, and completely
updated the API documentation for Element, Element.Elements, and
Element.Attributes; the rest of the classes to follow.  I'm seriously
contemplating removing the examples from the API documentation,
because most of them are practically duplicates of the unit tests in
test/.  I suppose I should solicit feedback about this, but nobody
looks at the unit tests anyway, so I expect I'll just get a lot of
people telling me to leave the code snippits in there.

Downloads at the usual place:

  http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml

Thanks for your attention, and thanks again to all of the great people
who pester me with bug reports.