DocBook V4.4 Released

Volume 8, Issue 13; 28 Jan 2005; last modified 08 Oct 2010

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.