DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Future Directions

With the introduction of DocBook V5.0, there have been several new initiatives started to take advantage of the increased flexibility and customizability of the standard. Two of these initiatives have become subcommittees of the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee:

OASIS DocBook Publisher’s Subcommittee

This subcommittee is chartered to develop and maintain official variants of DocBook in support of the publishing industry. In May, 2009, this subcommittee released The DocBook Publishers Schema Version 1.0, a draft based on the DocBook V5.0 standard.

OASIS DocBook eLearning Subcommittee

This subcommittee will develop enhancements to the DocBook standard for eLearning applications, including materials for online learning, instructor-led training and other related educational activities.

DocBook Assembly Mechanism

In addition to these two subcommittees, there is a current effort to create markup for an “assembly” capability to better support development of documents using a modular approach.

Most modular methodologies use a topic-oriented approach, where writers create independent units of information that are meant to stand alone. Topics are then collected into a library in much the same way that programmers create libraries of functions. Authors select the topics they need to assemble the documentation for a particular system from the library.

In order to support modular methodologies, you need support for marking up individual topics, which DocBook does well. You also need ...