DocBook 5 beta 6 has added support for SVG+MathML

Great news this month for those doing software documentation using DocBook!

Not only does the latest beta of DocBook 5.0 support Schematron schema rules and RELAX NG schema grammar for validating DocBooks - it also adds support to DocBook itself for MathML and SVG.

It does not take a genius to figure out why DocBook upgraded its validation scheme when it upgraded itself to support these 2 new XML modules.

The XHTML 2.0 standard is another popular XML standard that is eschewing the older DTD/XSD schema technology in order to get the flexibility - not to mention ease of writing/reading/understanding that RELAX NG proffers.

My guess on what motivation for adding support for SVG+MathML is that Firefox 1.5 supports them, as well has XHTML. And, not just that Firefox supports having them combined in a single document - all 3 of them!

My guess is that the world of software documentation authoring/reading/distibution is about to take a turn into W3 nirvana. It is nice to see that after so long existing as separate - and often ignored - technologies, they are all finally getting integrated at last.

Cafe con Leche XML News and Resources:

Norm Walsh has published the sixth beta of DocBook 5.0.

DocBook 5 is "a significant redesign that attempts to remain true to the spirit of DocBook."

The schema is written in RELAX NG. A DTD and W3C XML Schema generated from the RELAX NG schema are also available.

There's also a Schematron schema "that validates some extra-grammatical DocBook constraints. These patterns are also present directly in the RELAX NG Grammar and some validators, for example MSV, can perform both kinds of validation at the same time."

This beta allows MathML and SVG in imagedata and improves support for aspect-oriented programming source code in DocBook documents.

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