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Adding to the already existing confusion surrounding MSXML versions, Microsoft released number four of what is now called Microsoft XML Core Services. While innovation is a good thing, the growing number of different levels of XML support on Microsoft platforms is worrysome. But the good news first, the new version has a number of improvements compared to MSXML 3.0:
MSXML 4 supports the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium's final recommendation for XML Schema. Processing can be both event-driven using the Simple API for XML (SAX) interface as well as document-centric with the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) approach.
The XSLT engine for processing XML documents with XML style sheet transformations is substantially faster now, Microsoft claims 4 to 8 times faster than before. Complex transformations need less time and memory than before.
There is also a new and substantially faster SAX parser, which can also be used in conjunction with DOM when the "NewParser" property is set like this: dom.setProperty("NewParser," true).
Better support for sequential architectures and streamed XML processing based on SAX 2. SAX 2 extends the first version with support for XML namespaces, for setting up filter chains for parsing events, and for querying and setting features and properties in the underlying parser.
The unavoidable odd bug fix.
Microsoft has finally achieved better standards conformance. Specifically, the following old, non-conformant technologies have been removed:
Produced by Michael Claßen
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Created: Oct 29, 2001
Revised: Oct 29, 2001
