Ken MacLeod has announced a preview version of the Perl reference SAX2 implementation.

On the Perl-XML list, he writes:

This tar file includes SAXDriver::XMLParser and three support modules for using SAX2 (the core Node class, the XML node classes, and a tree builder). This preview does not include PODs but is API stable (for common XML) and includes extensive self-tests.

The preview version implements most of the basic SAX 2.0 features identified by MacLeod. Features yet to come include parsing directly from a file handle, advanced whitespace handling, and anything documented in the Advanced SAX document.

MacLeod notes the major differences between Perl SAX1 and SAX2:

Besides added support for XML Namespaces (NamespaceURI, LocalName, and Prefix properties), SAX2 differs from SAX1 in that SAX2 attributes are hashes of objects (Name, NamespaceURI, LocalName, Prefix, and Value) (whereas SAX1 was a hash of just attribute values).