[Vorbis-dev] Upgrade Doc to DocBook 5.0?

Michael Crawford mdcrawford at gmail.com
Sat Feb 7 19:54:30 PST 2009


I'd like to ask what you all would think of me upgrading the libvorbis
doc from whatever version of DocBook it presently uses to DocBook 5.0.
 There are three good reasons:

- It supports XML namespaces, so you can embed stuff like Scalable
Vector Graphics and MathML right into your DocBook source.

- DocBook 5.0 uses Relax NG Schemas.  This is a far, far better
specification language than either DTD or the W3C XML schema.  It's
also far stricter, so it will find errors in your DocBook markup that
wouldn't be possible to find in markup written for earlier DocBook
versions.

    http://relaxng.org/

- It's pretty easy to do certain kinds of customizations that would be
quite difficult with earlier DocBook versions.

It's not actually very hard to do the upgrade - there is a script
available to do all the simple work; what must be done by hand isn't
very hard.

I just moved The ZooLib Cookbook from DocBook 4.1.2 to DocBook 5.0.
The only hard part was the usual cryptic error messages from the
validator.  But once the markup is gotten to be valid, all the tools
actually work really well.

Normal Walsh has a HOWTO on making the transition:

   http://www.docbook.org/docs/howto/

Ever Faithful,

Mike
-- 
Michael David Crawford
mdcrawford at gmail dot com

   I'm looking for a job in Silicon Valley:
     http://www.goingware.com/resume/cover-letter.html


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