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

DITA Learning Content specialization open for review!

The OASIS DITA Learning and Training Content Specialization Subcommittee is proud to announce the availability of our specification for DITA Learning Content for public review.

The design and language specification for the DITA learning and training content is available here, and the DITA Open Toolkit plugin with working DTD, XSD, DITA content samples, and documentation is available here.

The goal of the subcommittee is to develop a general top-level design for structured, intent-based authoring of learning content with good learning architecture, following DITA principles and best practices.

This specification was formally submitted to the full OASIS DITA Technical Committee today, after we completed the designs, samples, and language specifications for the learning topic types, the learning map domain, the learning interaction domain, and IEEE LOM learning metadata. The intention is to have this specification approved by the TC for inclusion in DITA 1.2, though most of this work is built on the existing DITA 1.1 infrastructure.

Please send any review comments via the public comment facility.

DITA 1.1 approved as Committee Draft!

The OASIS DITA TC has unanimously approved DITA 1.1 as a Committee Draft. The announcement for start of public review from OASIS should come soon.

This is an important achievement, as it includes the long-anticipated bookmap and glossary specializations and the following new extensibility features to the DITA standard:

• A bookmap specialization for encoding book-specific information in a DITA map
• A glossentry specialization for glossary entries
• Indexing specializations for see, see-also, page ranges, and sort order
• Improvements to graphic scaling capability
• Improved short description flexibility through a new element
• Specialization support for new global attributes, such as conditional processing attributes
• Support for integration of existing content structures through the <foreign> element
• Support for new kinds of information and structures through the <data> and <unknown> elements
• Formalization of conditional processing profiles

I will send out the URL to the Architectural Spec and Language Reference when they are posted to the public review site.