DocBook v5.1 is now an official OASIS Standard!

OASIS is pleased to announce that DocBook Version 5.1. has been approved by the membership as an OASIS Standard [1].

The call to vote was made on 09 November 2016 [2] and the ballot closed on 22 November 2016. A minimum of 42 affirmative votes was needed in order to win approval. The finally vote tally was 63 affirmative votes with 4 abstentions. 

Our congratulations to the members of the TC and to the community of implementers, developers and users who have brought the work successfully to this milestone

DocBook is a general purpose [XML] schema particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though it is by no means limited to these applications).

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

The Technical Committee provides the DocBook 5.1 schema in other schema languages, including W3C XML Schema and an XML DTD, but the RELAX NG Schema is the normative schema.

URIs:

The prose specifications and related files are available here:

DocBook Version 5.1

HTML (Authoritative): 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.html 

PDF: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.pdf

Editable source:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.xml

Schemas: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/schemas/

DocBook V4.x conversion tools: 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/tools/

Distribution ZIP files

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file here:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/os/docbook-v5.1-os.zip

Voting opens for DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS Standard

The ballot to approve DocBook v5.1 as an OASIS standard is now open, starting at 09 November 2016 at 00:00 UTC. The ballot closes at 22 November 2016 at 11:59 UTC. 

This is a call to the primary or alternate representatives of OASIS Organizational Members to vote. 

If your company is a member of OASIS, please encourage your representative to vote in favor of this standard at: https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=3010 

The Version 5.1 release introduces assemblies for topic-oriented authoring. It also addresses a selection of bugs and feature requests.

To view the specification, please see:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/docbook/docbook/v5.1/cos01/docbook-v5.1-cos01.html

Media Standards for XML

Please excuse the vanity post, but I'm proud to be a contributing author to The Language of Technical Communication! My article is entitled, "Media Standards for XML" on pg 78. Lots of great information in this book compiled by Ray Gallon. Check it out!

Presenting at XML-in-Practice 2009!

I've just been accepted to present at XML-in-Practice 2009, September 30 - October 1, 2009 at the Arlington Hilton near Washington DC!

My presentation entitled, Professional Publishing on a Shoestring Budget, will discuss how to optimize your multi-channel publishing processes using the latest approved DocBook v5.0 schema and the DocBook Publishers schema.

Details on the conference are available at the XML-in-Practice website.

I hope to see you there!

New versions of Jing and Trang!

Woohoo! after almost 5 years, James Clark has released a new version of Jing and Trang. They are available at: http://code.google.com/p/jing-trang/.

I've run into a few issues with trang and XSD in the past. Hopefully this addresses some of those issues? Will run a few tests and post my results...

UPDATE:Sigh. Trang still won't convert XSD to RNG. XSD continues to be the biggest thorn in my side. Long live RelaxNG!

UPDATE 2:Good news! This feature is on the "someday" list: http://code.google.com/p/jing-trang/issues/detail?id=4

Move to ROA

Saw an interesting post on the O'Reilly blog from XML 2007:

Instead of SOA (SOAP, XML Schema, WSDL, UDDI, WS-*) move to ROA: RelaxNG, REST, Atom, AtomPub, and OpenSearch.) [I’ve never heard “Resource oriented architecture”/ROA before.]

Sounds right to me! Of course, you know my famous quote:

If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

Sounds like the industry is finally catching on! I'll have to look deeper into this ROA approach as well.

Missing XML 2007

Once again, I'm left disappointed because I couldn't get travel authorization from my company. This happened when I was at Sun, and now at Flatirons. It's frustrating because the big XML conference is one of the best opportunities to learn about cutting edge developments in the industry and to network with industry leaders. It's about the best form of training I can get anymore. Once you are at a certain level of XML expertise, web courses just don't cut it!

Unfortunately, my paper wasn't accepted this year, or I would have tried to find a way to pay my own way to get there. I had to do that one year when I was at Sun, and swore I shouldn't have to do that again.

I'm also disappointed, because I'll miss the annual DocBook Dinner! Hopefully I'll get a chance to see everyone at some point during the new year...

Czech Comments for Office Open XML (in English!)

Jirka Kosek has graciously provided an English translation of the Czech Standards Institute's comments on the Microsoft-created Office Open XML standard.

The English version is here: http://xmlguru.cz/2007/08/czech-ooxml-comments-in-english

I also thought it was interesting to visually see the size of this monster spec. See the photos here: http://xmlguru.cz/2007/07/czech-comments-ooxml

Personally, I'm glad Microsoft finally got around to providing the specs for their XML export from their products. I also despise the markup, but at least it's documented. I also thought it was a bit underhanded and deliberate to name it "Office Open XML" which is so incredibly similar to the Open Office product that uses the OASIS Open Document Format. They could have just named it MOM - Microsoft Office Markup language...

Thanks for the comments on the standard, Jirka!

Interoperability getting some attention!

We're getting some exposure on the Doc Standards Interoperability Framework now! Check out this entry on the Gilbane blog:
http://gilbane.com/blog/2007/04/dita_docbook_and_odf_interoper.html

Thanks to Jim for sending me the link...

SKYWARN at the OASIS Symposium

SWEET! Being a trained SKYWARN spotter and HAM operator, I was really impressed by the presentation from Michelle Raymond on the Emergency Management TC. During the presentation, she sent an alert to an OASIS demo web service that alerted many blackberries in the audience. Wish I had a subscription to that service :-)

The Emergency Data eXchange Language (EDXL) was described in detail, including the Common Alerting Progocal (CAP). NWS uses the CAP already today!

This may be one of the few times I will ever get to use the tags "Weather" and "OASIS" on the same blog post! :-)

Some interesting sites related to this include: http://www.esi911.com/esi/products/webeoc.shtml

Interoperability at OASIS Symposium 2007

I'm presenting this week at the OASIS Symposium in San Diego.

A very interesting theme has emerged in the morning sessions, which is that of interoperability. I find this very encouraging and other standards bodies should stand up and take notice!

Bob Sutor, VP of Open Source and Standards at IBM gave a very interesting keynote that included this theme. He gave a great example of ODF and how they are addressing accessibility and interoperability as part of the standard.

Another interesting tidbit from his preso was on how to measure the "openness" of a standard:

• Development - how was it developed, who got to play, who contributed, how much did they contribute?
• Maintenance – who is maintaining? How are RFEs handled? Errors? What happens after v1?
• Implementation – are there any roadblocks preventing open source? Can it be implemented?
• Acquisition – can you get a hold of the standard? Can you download for free? Many standards orgs are not that way! Can you afford it around the world?

Following Bob's keynote, another terrific presentation was given by Bob Stayton. Bob Stayton was talking about interoperability between DocBook and DITA. Bob primarily focused on a form of processing interoperability, where source DITA content is transformed to DocBook to take advantage of the DocBook publishing toolchain.

After Bob, I presented "A Doc Standards Interoperability Framework for DocBook, DITA, ODF and more!". I'll provide a link here when the slides are available online.

Overall, the talk was well received and I look forward to getting the proposed Document Standards Interoperability TC started at OASIS! I also had the pleasure of meeting Alex Wang, from the UOML TC, who has been very active on the docstandards-interop-discuss list at OASIS recently. I look forward to exchanging ideas about interoperability!

This is the first OASIS Symposium I've attended. Hats off to Patrick Gannon, Mary McRae, Jane Harnad and the other OASIS folks who've put this together. I'm quite pleased with the level of technical detail and expertise here at the Symposium.

I'm attending some presos on BPEL, BPM and SCA (Business Process Modeling and SOA Component Architectures) right now. Will blog additional detail later!

Welcome, James!

James Clark, the father of groff, sgmls, SP, DSSL, Jade, expat, XP, XT, TREX, XSLT, nXML mode, Relax, Jing, Trang, and best of all RelaxNG has entered the blogosphere! His blog is http://blog.jclark.com

James has started with an interesting proposal called TEDI (Type Expressions for Data Interchange, pronounced "Teddy").

James, please keep working on RelaxNG, too! For its elegance and ease of use, I love it! Remember: If you're not RelaxNG, you're working too hard!

Dynamic Publishing with DITA

With DITA's modular, reusable information elements, you can not only publish across different formats and media - but also flexibly recombine information in almost any way you like.

Initial DITA implementations have focused primarily on publishing to pre-defined PDF, HTML and Help formats - basically static publishing with DITA. The real promise of DITA, however, lies in supporting dynamic, personalized content delivery.

At Flatirons Solutions, we've developed a very cool application on top of Mark Logic to enable this dynamic publishing. We've written a whitepaper about it here:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/Downloads/Whitepaper_DCD_Using_DITA.pdf
This whitepaper defines a new publishing paradigm, which we will call dynamic content delivery. Dynamic delivery changes the rules, putting the reader in charge of what content is important and how it should be packaged. It transforms publishing to an audience of many to publishing to an "audience of one".

What's Inside:

• Static vs. Dynamic Publishing
• DITA: Dynamic Assembly of Topics
• A Scalable Approach to Dynamic Content Delivery
• A Complete DITA Publishing Solution
• Bottom Line Benefits

Thought provoking Web 2.0 clip on YouTube

Very interesting clip. Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Does Interoperability Really Matter?

My colleague, Jim Earley, and think so! Come to DITA West 2007 and find out why.

Jim and I will be presenting on a Doc Standards Interoperability Framework for DITA, DocBook, ODF and more! Our innovative approach provides mappings between the more prevalent documentation standards without inventing a new XML grammar.

Learn about the similarities between many of the documentation standards, how to map content between them, and how to process content with maximum fidelity using this framework!

We will also be presenting this framework at Open Publish and the OASIS Symposium.

Hope to see you there!

XSLT 2.0, XQuery and XPath 2.0 now official!

It's official! XSLT 2.0, XQuery and XPath 2.0 are now full-fledged W3C Recommendations today.

XSLT 2.0 is da bomb! I'm still learning XQuery, but it pretty much rocks too. Now if we could just get more folks using RelaxNG, I'll be a happy camper!

An XML editor for the masses

Tony DaSilva has written a very excellent and thorough review of XMLMind XXE at http://www.writersua.com/articles/xmlmind/index.html. It's a very good editor, and something you should consider if you belong to an authoring group that is new to structured markup.

Tony's review is very informative. Even though I've used the tool before, I still learned something new: interactive margins!

I've used the Standard Edition to test DocBook 5 customization layers, and it works like a champ! It's one of the few XML authoring tools that supports RelaxNG validation, too. Just try finding that support in Arbortext or XMetal!

The editor also supports DITA, though I've found it's map support a bit weak. I'm sure that will change over time.

For markup geeks and power users, I still recommend oXygen, but for authors, XMLMind is one of my new favorite choices!

Standards Pecha-Kucha!

Dave Megginson posted that for XML 2007, they are considering a standards pecha-kucha!

Each standards committee will have 20 slides (at 20 seconds each) to give us a quick update on what they’ve been doing over 2007 and what to expect in 2008 — that will make it possible for attendees to learn a bit about a lot of standards in a relatively short time.

I think this is a tremendously good idea! I attended the vendor pecha-kucha night at XML 2006, and found it both entertaining and informative. Michael Smith provided the impetus to get the pecha-kucha night started. I hope he'll host again, as he did a great job.

The timing would definitely a challenge (20 seconds per slide), though I have never tried presenting in a pecha-kucha format. Standards efforts I'm currently involved with include:

• OASIS DocBook TC
• OASIS DITA TC
• OASIS DITA Learning Content subcommittee
• OASIS Doc Standards Interoperability forum
• OASIS DITA-S1000D Interoperability discussion list

New Discussion List: OASIS DITA S1000D Interoperability

I've kicked off a new discussion list at OASIS to address interoperability between S1000D and DITA!

The address of this list is:
dita-s1000d-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org

Anyone, including OASIS members and non-members, may subscribe to this list in order to discuss the merits and possibility of the proposed project. The list is now open, and can be joined by sending a message to:
dita-s1000d-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org

Here is the official statement of scope:

DITA is an OASIS XML markup standard designed for topic-based authoring and re-use. It is also designed for interoperability, with a highly flexible specialization mechanism. For more information please see: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=dita

S1000D is also an XML markup standard designed for re-use. This standard is aimed primarily at civil and military equipment documentation. It is also focused on Data Modules and a Common Source Database. For more information please see: http://www.s1000d.org/

This discussion list is intended to facilitate an effort to graft S1000D type modules onto the DITA type hierarchy. The result would support content that's completely interoperable and provides a relatively good transform target (because of similar semantics and structure). This approach will have significant long-term benefits toward interoperability of content and authoring tools between the two standards.

Categories: DITA, S1000D, OASIS, standards, interoperability

XML 2006: DocBook Dinner

We had a great time at the DocBook Dinner at XML 2006. Attendees included: Norm Walsh, Nancy Harrison, Gary Cornelius, Elliotte "Rusty" Harold, Michael Smith, Bob DuCharme, Liam Quin, Jean, Paul Downey, myself. (I think I'm missing at least two others, so please help me complete the list!).

UPDATE: Doh! Eliot Kimber was sitting right next to me, and we chatted quite a bit. Sorry, Eliot!

We dined at Legal Seafoods, and had quite the variety of topics to discuss!