Category Archives: DocBook

DocBook TC Is Apparently No More

Leave a reply

Saw this on LinkedIn, of all places. Apparently, the OASIS DocBook Technical Committee have decided to cease activities.

What I found interesting was one of the comments. It asked “What’s your DocBook exit strategy?” Seriously? Do you think your DocBook setup will somehow stop working? Will you no longer be able to author your content? Publish? Parse? What?

Working groups are shut down all the time. They finish work, they move on to other things, their financing changes, etc. The W3C shut down its XML activity around ten years ago. Did your XML software stop working? No, of course not. While there is not going to be an XML 2.0 anytime soon, if ever, XML 1.0 is just fine. It’s everywhere.

I have no doubt DocBook will continue.

ProXist v2

Leave a reply

For the last few days, I’ve been busy updating ProXist, my XProc abstraction layer and app for eXist. There is a new(-ish) XProc package for eXist that promises to support a lot of (Norm Walsh’s XProc engine) Calabash’s capabilities, so I decided it was time to test it out and do a new ProXist at the same time.

My XML Prague ProXist version supported only my custom document type and stylesheets, and barely those at that. It was meant to be a demo. For the new version, though, I’m thinking of doing a default implementation for DocBook, including some of the more commonly used stylesheets and a couple of standard pipelines, packaged so they can be used with ProXist–it should be a question of writing a ProX blueprint XML file, theoretically, plus something that helps me list DocBook resources included using XInclude.

At the same time, I’m finally updating the ProXist documentation. It’s written using DocBook, incidentally, and now part of the git repository.

ProXist is not even close to being finished, but at least I seem to have moved on from procrastinating to actually doing something.