Rick Schaut Says:
December 7th, 2006 at 4:20 pm ,
With respect to libXml, there are some additional points worth considering:
1) 18 months ago, we hadn?t made the decision of the minium OS version that Office 12 was going to support.
2) Shipping an updated version of an open source library is a non-starter, for one simple reason: if there?s a security flaw in the version we ship, we?re on the hook for that security issue without having ownership of the code. The potential legal issues are too risky to allow us to go down that route.
3) We need more than just SAX2 compliance. We also need DOM support on the write side.
4) LibXML?s APIs all use UTF8 for string arguments (or, at least, the libXML that shipped with Panther did). MSXML uses UTF16. Since Win Office is written to MSXML, we?d either have to rewrite considerable portions of the code we port from Win Office, or write UTF16 wrappers around the API?s and the callbacks.
All of those combined to make a difficult decision fall on the MSXML side of the fence.