Announce: DocBook V4.2 Released

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

On 16 July 2002, the DocBook Technical Committee (TC) approved
publication of DocBook V4.2[1] as a Committee Specification. DocBook
V4.2 is available as a DTD for both XML[2] and SGML[3] systems.
Henceforth, DocBook V4.2 is the official, current version of the
DocBook Document Type.

At the same meeting, the TC agreed to advance DocBook V4.2 for
publication as an OASIS Standard at the next opportunity.

DocBook is general purpose XML and SGML document type particularly
well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software
(though it is by no means limited to these applications).

The Version 4.2 release is a maintainance release. It introduces no
backwards-incompatible changes. All valid DocBook 4.1 documents are
also valid DocBook 4.2 documents.

The DocBook Technical Committee welcomes bug reports and requests for
enhancement (RFEs) from the user community. The current list of
outstanding requests is available through the SourceForge tracker
interface[4]. This is also the preferred mechanism for submitting new
requests.

Future development work, for the balance of this year at least, is
expected to concentrate on DocBook V5.0 with a first candidate release
tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2003. The DocBook TC expects
to publish official DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C XML Schema versions of
DocBook V5.0.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/specs/cs-docbook-docbook-4.2.html
[2] http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/
[3] http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/sgml/4.2/
[4] http://sourceforge.net/tracker//?atid=384107&group_id=21935&func=browse

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Youth lasts much longer than young
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | people think.--Comtesse Diane
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |