In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.
When looking at one of the latest commits in the project’s GitLab repository, you can now see the following notice:
“This project is unmaintained and has known security issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”
It was in fact these non-browser interests that initially poisoned W3C to take the position of completely abandoning html for XML back in 2004… Where the browser companies immediately ignored the decision and formed their own working group (whatwg) which worked on almost all new web technologies post html4.