| DocBook v4.1 becomes official OASIS specification
Last week, OASIS
members completed voting on the current XML and SGML
versions of the DocBook DTD,
approving the DTDs and their accompanying documentation as
an official OASIS specification.
Though the previous (v3.1) version of DocBook (released
in February 1999) was apparently an OASIS specification
also, the current versions of the DTDs (which have been
available since last summer) are the first to be approved
under a new OASIS technical committee process that was
implemented last fall.
DocBook has become widely used for authoring books,
articles, and papers of all kinds. In particular, it has
become an industry-standard vocabulary for authoring
computer hardware and software documentation in XML/SGML.
Many commercial editing- and publishing-tool vendors
provide built-in support for DocBook in their applications,
and many open-source packages are available that provide
integrated DocBook support, including the Debian
task-sgml package, the docbook-tools
package (RPMs), and Paul Kinnucan's XAE.
DocBook is well-documented (see Walsh and Muellner's DocBook:
The Definitive Guide), provides a sophisticated
customization layer so that users can tailor it to their
specific needs, is accompanied by freely available XSL and DSSSL
stylesheets for use in transforming DocBook source for HTML
and print publication (as well as other utilities for
converting to UNIX man pages, Texinfo files, and Microsoft
HTML Help), and is supported through active
DocBook-specific mailing
lists.
Commercial organizations known to use DocBook for some
of their document authoring include Novell, Sun,
Hewlett-Packard, SCO, and Red Hat. Open-source projects
that use DocBook include the KDE, GNOME,
FreeBSD,
Debian, and Linux documentation
projects.
OASIS has been the home of the DocBook Technical
Committee since 1998, with Eduardo Gutentag serving as the
original chair. DocBook was first designed and implemented
by HaL Computer Systems and O'Reilly &
Associates in 1991. In 1994, responsibility for
development of the DTD was taken over by the Davenport
Group, an independent entity whose original members
included Eve Maler, Jon Bosak, Dale Dougherty, Ralph
Ferris, Dave Hollander, Murray Maloney, Conleth O'Connell,
Nancy Paisner, Mike Rogers, and Jean Tappan.
DocBook development is now in the hands of the voting
members of the DocBook Technical Committee at OASIS: Norman
Walsh (chair), Terry Allen, Tony Graham, Dennis Evans, and
Michael Sabrio. In May 2000, the Technical Committee
produced the first official XML version of DocBook. More
recently, experimental versions of DocBook were made
available in the W3C XML Schema
language, Murata (Makoto)'s RELAX, and James
Clark's TREX.
The Technical Committee has stated that the next major
version of DocBook, v5.0, will be an XML DTD that includes
"sufficient parameterization to allow SGML features to be
'turned on' with a very small customization layer", which
the committee will provide.
For more detailed descriptions of the history of
DocBook, see Dale Dougherty's article
The Making of the DocBook DTD and the What
is DocBook? page at the official DocBook site.
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