The DocBook Technical Committee has released DocBook V4.4 as a Committee Draft.
DocBook V4.4 is now a Committee Draft. In the OASIS process, that represents the last step before full OASIS Standard; it indicates that the document represents the consensus of the technical committee. It's as high as we can take it without getting a full vote of the entire OASIS membership.
Version 4.4 is backwards-compatible with all of the schemas in the V4.x series. The new features are:
- Added rowheader attribute to CALS <table> and <informaltable>. If rowheader is firstcol, the first column of each row is to be treated as a row header. If norowheader is specified, no special treatment is given to the first column of each row.
- Added wordsize as a global effectivity attribute, per the June, 2004 minutes.
- Added xml:space to verbatim environments in the XML schemas.
- Added “protocol” to the list of class values allowed on the <systemitem> element.
- Added the HTML forms hook to several “mix” parameter entities so that HTML forms can occur in more places when the HTML Forms Module is used.
- Switched to the W3C XML Entity Declarations for Characters. These entities are distributed for historical compatibility and user convenience. The DocBook Technical Committee no longer attempts to maintain these definitions and will periodically update them from the W3C site if and as they are updated there.
- Removed xml:base from the SGML DTD.
- Allow HTML tables to nest (allow <table> and <informaltable> inside <td> and <th>).
- Changed the rules attribute, which can appear on HTML tables, from an enumeration to CDATA. This avoids a conflict with the enumerated values on the frame attribute on CALS tables.
- Added <package> element per the Febuary, 2004 meeting.
- Allow <imageobjectco> as a child of <mediaobject> (this effectively makes <mediaobjectco> unnecessary) per the Febuary, 2004 meeting.
- Added <biblioref> element per the May, 2004 meeting.
- Added spacing attribute to <variablelist> per the April, 2004 meeting.
- Added <superscript> and <subscript> to the content model of the <gui*> elements per the May, 2004 meeting.
Share and enjoy!
I am optimistic that the next schema the technical committee publishes will be V5.0α1.
Comments:
OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta now supports DocBook as a word-processing format. It writes 4.1.2, at least in the 1.9.69 build; I'm not sure what range of versions it reads.