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    <span class="refentrytitle">libxml2 Reference Manual</span>
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  <p>Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project

(but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available under the <a href=“MIT”>www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html“>MIT License</a>. XML itself is a metalanguage to design markup languages, i.e. text language where semantic and structure are added to the content using extra ”markup“ information enclosed between angle brackets. HTML is the most well-known markup language. Though the library is written in C <a href=”a“>xmlsoft.org/python.html”>a variety of language bindings</a> make it available in other environments.</p>

<p>Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup

languages:</p>

<ul>
  <li>the XML standard: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml</a></li>
  <li>Namespaces in XML: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/">http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/</a></li>
  <li>XML Base: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlbase/</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2396.txt">RFC 2396</a> :

Uniform Resource Identifiers <a href=“http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txtwww.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt”>http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt>

<li>XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath">http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath</a></li>
<li>HTML4 parser: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/">http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/</a></li>
<li>XML Pointer Language (XPointer) Version 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr">http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr</a></li>
<li>XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/">http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/</a></li>
<li>ISO-8859-x encodings, as well as <a href="http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2044.txt">rfc2044</a> [UTF-8]

and <a href=“rfc2781www.cis.ohio-state.edu/rfc/rfc2781.txt”>rfc2781>

UTF-16

Unicode encodings, and more if using iconv support</li>

<li>part of SGML Open Technical Resolution TR9401:1997</li>
<li>XML Catalogs Working Draft 06 August 2001: <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/spec-2001-08-06.html</a></li>
<li>Canonical XML Version 1.0: <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n">http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n</a>

and the Exclusive XML Canonicalization CR draft <a href=“http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14nwww.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n”>http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-exc-c14n>

<li>Relax NG, ISO/IEC 19757-2:2003, <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html">http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/relax-ng/spec-20011203.html</a></li>
<li>W3C XML Schemas Part 2: Datatypes <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/">REC 02 May

2001</a></li>

<li>W3C <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-id/">xml:id</a> Working Draft 7

April 2004</li>

  </ul>
  <p> As a result the <a href="general.html">libxml2 API</a> is very
            large. If you get lost searching for some specific API use
            <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/search.php">the online search
            engine</a> hosted on <a href="http://xmlsoft.org/">xmlsoft.org</a>
            the libxml2 and libxslt project page. </p>
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