STIL and STILTS release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear table enthusiasts,

this message announces new releases of the table access library STIL 
and the STIL Tool Set STILTS.  The new releases can be found at
the usual places and are as follows:

   - STIL v2.8:
        http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/

   - STILTS v2.0-5:
        http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

The main new items are enhancements to VOTable handling: improved handling
of VOTable documents with XML namespace declarations, and compliance
with VOTable 1.2, including VOTable 1.2 validation using the votlint
validator.  Some other bug fixes and minor enhancements have been
made as well; see the version histories for details:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html
   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html

There is no corresponding update to TOPCAT, which will work fine with
VOTable 1.2 documents as it stands.

The VOTable 1.2 compliance is to the VOTable 1.2 PR 2009-09-29 draft
(http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/IvoaVOTable/PR-VOTable-1.2-20090929.pdf).
This is not yet a formal IVOA recommendation, but the expectation is
that the eventual REC will not differ in significant respects from this
draft.

The next release of STIL may contain some API changes which are not
backwardly compatible with this and previous releases.

Any comments, queries or problems, please contact me.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/