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DocBook
File name extension . A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a Computer file applied to indicate the encoding convention ( File format) of its contents dbk, . xml
Internet media type application/docbook+xml
Developed by OASIS
Type of format markup language
Extended from SGML, XML

DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. An Internet media type, originally called a MIME type after MIME and sometimes a Content-type after the name of a header in several protocols whose value The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards ( OASIS) is a Global consortium that drives the development convergence and adoption A markup language is an Artificial language using a set of annotations to text that give instructions regarding the structure of text or how it is to be displayed The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages Don't change "Extensible" Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from A markup language is an Artificial language using a set of annotations to text that give instructions regarding the structure of text or how it is to be displayed Documentation may refer to the process of providing evidence ("to document something" or to the communicable material used to provide such documentation (i It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation.

As a semantic language, DocBook enables its users to create document content in a presentation-neutral form that captures the logical structure of the content; that content can then be published in a variety of formats, including HTML, PDF, man pages and HTML Help, without requiring users to make any changes to the source. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like Operating systems have extensive documentation known as man pages (short for "manual pages" Microsoft Compiled HTML Help is a proprietary format for online help files developed by Microsoft and first released in 1997 as a successor to the

Contents

Overview

DocBook, in its current version 5. 0, is an XML language. Don't change "Extensible" DocBook's language is defined by a RELAX NG schema with integrated Schematron rules. In Computing, RELAX NG ( REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation) is a schema language for XML, based on Murata Makoto 's RELAX An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type above and beyond In Markup Languages, Schematron is a rule-based validation language for making assertions about the presence or absence of patterns in XML trees There are also W3C XML Schema+Schematron and Document Type Definition (DTD) versions of the schema available, but these are considered non-normative. XML Schema, published as a W3C recommendation in May 2001 is one of several XML schema languages. Document Type Definition ( DTD) is one of several SGML and XML schema languages and is also the term used to describe a document or portion thereof that Normative has specialized meanings in several academic disciplines

As a semantic language, DocBook documents do not describe what their contents look like, but rather the meaning of those contents. For example, rather than explaining how the abstract for an article might be visually formatted, DocBook simply says that a particular section is an abstract. It is up to an external processing tool or application to decide where on a page the abstract should go and what it should look like.

DocBook provides a vast number of semantic element tags. They are divided into three broad categories: structural, block-level, and inline. Structural tags specify broad characteristics of their contents. The book element, for example, specifies that its child elements represent the parts of a book. This includes a title, chapters, glossaries, appendices, and so on. DocBook's structural tags include, but are not limited to:

Structural elements can contain other structural elements. Structural elements are the only permitted top-level elements in a DocBook document.

Block-level tags are elements like paragraph, lists, and so forth. Not all of these elements can contain actual text directly. Sequential block-level elements are expected to be rendered one "below" another. Below, in this case, can differ depending on the language. In most Western languages, Below means below; text paragraphs are printed down the page. In Chinese, by contrast, text paragraphs are printed from left to right, so "below" in that case would be to the right. DocBook semantics are entirely neutral to these kinds of language-based concepts.

Inline-level tags are elements like emphasis, hyperlinks, and so forth. They wrap text within a block-level element. These elements do not cause the text to break when rendered in a paragraph format, but they can provide special typographical treatment to the text, by changing the font, size, or similar attributes. The specific kind of changes are not part of the DocBook specification. That is, it is not required that a DocBook processor transform an emphasis tag into italics. A reader-based DocBook processor could increase the volume of the words. Or a text-based processor could use bold instead of italics. The DocBook specification does say that it expects different typographical treatment, but it does not offer specific requirements as to what this treatment may be.

Sample code

<?xml version="1. 0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <book xml:id="simple_book" xmlns="http://docbook. org/ns/docbook" version="5. 0">
   <title>Very simple book</title>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_1">
     <title>Chapter 1</title>
     <para>Hello world!</para>
     <para>I hope that your day is proceeding <emphasis>splendidly</emphasis>!</para>
   </chapter>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_2">
     <title>Chapter 2</title>
     <para>Hello again, world!</para>
   </chapter>
 </book>

Semantically, this document is a book, with a title, that contains two chapters with their own titles. Those chapters contain paragraphs that have text in them. The markup is fairly readable in English.

In more detail, the root element of the document is book. All DocBook elements are in an XML Namespace, so the root element has an xmlns attribute to set the current namespace. XML namespaces are used for providing uniquely named elements and attributes in an XML instance Also, the root element of a DocBook document must have a version that specifies the version of the format that the document is built on.

A book element must contain a title, or an info element containing a title. This must be before any child structural elements. Following the title are the structural children, in this case, two chapter elements. Each of these must have a title. They contain para block elements which can contain free text and other inline elements like the emphasis in the second paragraph of the first chapter.

DocBook Processing

The easiest way to provide a more presentational format for a DocBook document is to use the DocBook XSL stylesheets. The DocBook XSL stylesheets are a set of XSLT stylesheets for the XML -based DocBook language These are XSLT stylesheets that transform DocBook documents into a number of formats (HTML, XSL-FO for later conversion into PDF, etc). Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations ( XSLT) is an XML -based language used for the transformation of XML documents into other XML or "human-readable" HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure XSL Formatting Objects, or XSL-FO, is a Markup language for XML document formatting which is most often used to generate PDFs XSL-FO is part of XSL These stylesheets are intelligent enough to, with the proper parameters being set, generate tables of contents for books, sets, and any other structural element that could need a table of contents.

The DocBook XSL stylesheets are fine for simple documentation. But for more specific typography, the user can write their own XSLT stylesheet or even a full-fledged program to process the DocBook into an appropriate output format.

History

DocBook began in 1991 as a joint project of HAL Computer Systems and O'Reilly & Associates and eventually spawned its own maintenance organization (the Davenport Group) before moving in 1998 to the SGML Open consortium, which subsequently became OASIS. Year 1991 ( MCMXCI) was a Common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar. HAL Computer Systems was a Campbell CA -based computer manufacturer O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly Year 1998 ( MCMXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar) The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards ( OASIS) is a Global consortium that drives the development convergence and adoption DocBook is currently maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee at OASIS. (More detail about the history of DocBook is presented in the "What is DocBook?" external link below. )

DocBook is available in both SGML and XML forms, as a DTD. The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages Don't change "Extensible" Document Type Definition ( DTD) is one of several SGML and XML schema languages and is also the term used to describe a document or portion thereof that RELAX NG and W3C XML Schema forms of the XML version are available. In Computing, RELAX NG ( REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation) is a schema language for XML, based on Murata Makoto 's RELAX XML Schema, published as a W3C recommendation in May 2001 is one of several XML schema languages. Starting with DocBook 5, the RELAX NG version is the "normative" form from which the other formats are generated.

DocBook originally started out as an SGML application, but an equivalent XML application was developed and has now replaced the SGML one for most uses. The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages (Starting with version 4 of the SGML DTD, the XML DTD continued with this version numbering scheme. ) Initially, a key group of software companies used DocBook since their representatives were involved in its initial design. Eventually, however, DocBook was adopted by the open source community where it has become a standard for creating documentation for many projects, including FreeBSD, KDE, GNOME desktop documentation, the GTK+ API references, the Linux kernel documentation, and the work of the Linux Documentation Project. FreeBSD is a Unix-like free Operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD branch through KDE ( K Desktop Environment) (ˌkeɪdiːˈiː is a Free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use Desktop environment. A gnome is a Mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle GTK+, or The GIMP Toolkit, is a Cross-platform Widget toolkit for creating Graphical user interfaces It is one of the most popular toolkits Linux is an operating system kernel used by a family of Unix-like Operating systems These are popularly termed Linux operating systems and The Linux Documentation Project (LDP is an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of GNU and Linux -related documentation and publishes the collection

DocBook's use outside of the open source community also continues to grow. And a variety of commercial documentation-authoring tools are now shipped with some form of "off the shelf" support for DocBook.

Norman Walsh and the DocBook Project development team maintain the key application for producing output from DocBook source documents: A set of XSL stylesheets (as well as a legacy set of DSSSL stylesheets) that can generate high-quality HTML and print (FO/PDF) output, as well as output in other formats, including RTF, man pages and HTML Help. In Computing, the Extensible Stylesheet Language ( XSL) a family of Transformation languages allows one to describe how to format or transform files encoded Document Style Semantics and Specification Language ( DSSSL) is a Computer language for specifying stylesheets for SGML documents based on a subset of the HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure XSL Formatting Objects, or XSL-FO, is a Markup language for XML document formatting which is most often used to generate PDFs XSL-FO is part of XSL Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like Operating systems have extensive documentation known as man pages (short for "manual pages"

Walsh is also the principal author of the book DocBook: The Definitive Guide, the official documentation of DocBook. This book is available online under the GFDL, and also as a print publication. The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software

Because DocBook is XML, documents can be created and edited with any text editor, however many dedicated tools exist that simplify the process. Emacs in nXML mode comes with built-in DocBook schema information that allows users to quickly add elements or validate the document. Emacs is a class of feature-rich Text editors usually characterized by their extensibility A number of XML editing suites exist that come with DocBook schemas. There are WYSIWYG editors like XMLmind or the Oxygen XML Editor, which displays the DocBook document using CSS-based visual formatting for the individual elements. WYSIWYG (ˈwɪziwɪg or /ˈwɪzɪwɪg/ is an Acronym for W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G The <oXygen/> XML Editor is a multi-platform XML editor, XSLT / XQuery debugger and profiler with Unicode support

Pre DocBook v5. 0

The current version of DocBook, 5. 0, is fairly recent. Prior versions have been and still are in widespread use, so this section provides an overview of the changes to the older 4. x formats.

Until DocBook 5, DocBook was defined normatively by a Document Type Definition (DTD). Since DocBook was built originally as an application of SGML, the DTD was the only available schema language. The Standard Generalized Markup Language ( ISO 88791986 SGML) is an ISO Standard Metalanguage in which one can define Markup languages DocBook 4. x formats can be SGML or XML, but the XML version does not have its own namespace.

As an outgrowth of being defined by a DTD, DocBook 4. x formats were required to live within the restrictions of being defined by a DTD. The most significant for the language being that an element name uniquely defines its possible contents. That is, an element named info must contain the same information no matter where it is in the DocBook file. As such, there are many kinds of info elements in DocBook 4. x: bookinfo, chapterinfo, etc. Each of them has a slightly different content model, but they do share some of their content model. Additionally, they repeat context information. The book's info element is that because it is a direct child of the book; it does not need to be named specially for a human reader. However, because the format was defined by a DTD, it did have to be named as such.

The root element does not have or need a version, as the version is built into the DTD declaration at the top of a pre-DocBook 5 document.

DocBook 4. x documents are not compatible with DocBook 5, but they can be converted into DocBook 5 documents through the use of an XSLT stylesheet. One is provided as part of the distribution of the DocBook 5 schema and specification package.

Simplified DocBook

DocBook offers a large number of features that may be overwhelming to a new user. For those who want the convenience of DocBook without a large learning curve, Simplified DocBook was designed. It is a small subset of DocBook designed for single documents such as articles or white papers (i. e. , "books" are not supported). The Simplified DocBook DTD is currently at version 1. 1. [1]

References

See also

External links

Tutorials and References

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