Version 0.8 of the Python/XML supplementary distribution has been released. Major changes include addition of DOM Level 3 (WD) load/store and dropping of Python 1.5 support.

By leaving Python 1.5 support behind, PyXML moves towards simpler and more efficient code, given the earlier Python's lack of support for Unicode and several newer Python features that are handy in XML development.

The version of expat used has been bumped to 1.95.4, and the building of the more sophisticated pyexpat in PyXML has been made standard, to avoid confusion with the older, less efficient version that comes in Python itself.

The addition of more DOM Level 3 support (load and save, userdata, isSupported, getInterface, wholeText, replaceWholeText, Entity, Notation) tracks the working drafts which are approaching recommendation. Also, a new module (xml.dom.expatbuilder) allows more efficient creation of minidom trees by using expat directly (rather than through SAX).

There are also fixes to the XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL), SAX, xmlproc, sgmlop and c14n, and updates to documentation.

The full announcement is here, and the software can be downloaded from the SourceForge project page.