Apache XML Commons External

The External components portion of Apache XML Commons contains interfaces that are defined by external standards organizations. For DOM, that’s the W3C for SAX it’s David Megginson (http://www.saxproject.org) for JAXP it’s Sun. While we could send users to each of the primary sources for these deliverables, keeping our own versions of these in the XML Commons repository gives us a number of advantages: 1) Simplicity of downloads users get the whole product from one place, 2) Better version control we can only take fixes we want and add Apache-specific changes, 3) Better overview documentation of how these interfaces fit into the XML processing world, 4) More chance for cross-project community building within Apache projects.