Here are some of the new features in Xerces-J:

• Support for SAX2 alpha.
• Support for DOM Level 2 Core, Events, Traversal, and Ranges.
• Preliminary support for W3C XML Schema Language (validation only).
• Access to DTD information as a DOM Tree.
• Improved Conformance.
• Improved Performance.
• Parser option control based on SAX2.
• New "serialization" classes allow you output XML, HTML, and XHTML.
• New classes implement the HTML portion of the DOM Level 1 specification.

You can turn validation on and off via the SAX2 Configurable interface. This works for both the SAXParser and DOMParser classes.
The code snippet below shows how to turn validation on -- assume that parser is an instance of either org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser or org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser.

((Configurable)parser).setFeature("http://xml.org/sax/features/validation", true);

• UTF-8
• UTF-16 Big Endian, UTF-16 Little Endian
• IBM-1208
• ISO Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1)
• ISO Latin-2 (ISO-8859-2) [Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (in Latin transcription), Serbocroatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Upper and Lower Sorbian]
• ISO Latin-3 (ISO-8859-3) [Maltese, Esperanto]
• ISO Latin-4 (ISO-8859-4)
• ISO Latin Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5)
• ISO Latin Arabic (ISO-8859-6)
• ISO Latin Greek (ISO-8859-7)
• ISO Latin Hebrew (ISO-8859-8)
• ISO Latin-5 (ISO-8859-9) [Turkish]
• Extended Unix Code, packed for Japanese (euc-jp, eucjis)
• Japanese Shift JIS (shift-jis)
• Chinese (big5)
• Chinese for PRC (mixed 1/2 byte) (gb2312)
• Japanese ISO-2022-JP (iso-2022-jp)
• Cyrllic (koi8-r)
• Extended Unix Code, packed for Korean (euc-kr)
• Russian Unix, Cyrillic (koi8-r)
• Windows Thai (cp874)
• Latin 1 Windows (cp1252)
• cp858
• EBCDIC encodings:
• EBCDIC US (ebcdic-cp-us)
• EBCDIC Canada (ebcdic-cp-ca)
• EBCDIC Netherland (ebcdic-cp-nl)
• EBCDIC Denmark (ebcdic-cp-dk)
• EBCDIC Norway (ebcdic-cp-no)
• EBCDIC Finland (ebcdic-cp-fi)
• EBCDIC Sweden (ebcdic-cp-se)
• EBCDIC Italy (ebcdic-cp-it)
• EBCDIC Spain, Latin America (ebcdic-cp-es)
• EBCDIC Great Britain (ebcdic-cp-gb)
• EBCDIC France (ebcdic-cp-fr)
• EBCDIC Hebrew (ebcdic-cp-he)
• EBCDIC Switzerland (ebcdic-cp-ch)
• EBCDIC Roece (ebcdic-cp-roece)
• EBCDIC Yugoslavia (ebcdic-cp-yu)
• EBCDIC Iceland (ebcdic-cp-is)
• EBCDIC Urdu (ebcdic-cp-ar2)
• Latin 0 EBCDIC
• EBCDIC Arabic (ebcdic-cp-ar1)