DocBook V5.1 Beta 2

Earlier this month, I very quietly released DocBook V5.1b1. No one's suggested that I got it totally wrong (and there's evidence that at least a few people noticed!), so today, I released DocBook V5.1b2 with its corresponding documentation.

The star feature of DocBook V5.1 is support for “topic-based” documentation. At a minimum, that means we'll be adding a new component-level element with the semantically neutral name “topic” and providing some mechanism for composing topics.

Deciding to use topic makes a statement about the kind of documentation that you're building. Although you can make a book of topics, you can't mix topics willy-nilly amongst the more traditional narrative elements.

Topics by themselves aren't especially useful, to reap the real benefits of the topic-based authoring paradigm, you must be able to reuse them, to compose them together into new modules or structures (be they books, help systems, web sites, or what-have-you).

For this purpose, DocBook V5.1 introduces the assembly. Assemblies are the mechanism by which authors can compose topics (or, in fact, other narrative elements) together. My XML Prague presentation, Automating Document Assembly in DocBook explored one toolchain for processing assemblies. I've only just now realized that I never published that anywhere else.

Tools support for topic-based authoring in DocBook is under active development, as is the schema itself. I'll be presenting DocBook V5.1 at XML 2010 in Philadelphia this October.

Questions, comments, etc., most welcome on the DocBook mailing list.