DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Relaxing with DocBook

For more than a decade, the DocBook schema was defined using a DTD. However, DTDs have serious limitations, and DocBook V5.0 is thus defined using a powerful schema language called RELAX NG. Thanks to RELAX NG, it is now much easier to create customized versions of DocBook, and the content models are now cleaner and more precise.

Using RELAX NG has an impact on the document prolog. Example 1-1 shows the typical prolog of a DocBook 4.x document. The version of the DocBook DTD (in this case V4.5) is indicated in the Document Type Declaration (<!DOCTYPE>) that points to a particular version of the DTD.

Example 1-1. DocBook V4.5 document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC '-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN'
                         'http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd'>
<article lang="en">
  <title>Sample article</title>
  <para>This is a very short article.</para>
</article>

In contrast, DocBook V5.0 does not depend on DTDs anymore. Instead of the Document Type Declaration, the version attribute identifies the DocBook version, as shown in Example 1-2.

Example 1-2. DocBook V5.0 document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<article xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0" xml:lang="en">
  <title>Sample article</title>
  <para>This is a very short article.</para>
</article>

DocBook V5.0 is built on top of existing XML standards as much as possible. For example, the lang attribute is superseded by the standard xml:lang attribute.

Another fundamental change is that there is no direct indication of the schema used. In Chapter 3, you will learn how you can specify a schema to be used for document validation.

Note

Although we recommend the RELAX NG schema for DocBook V5.0, there are also DTD and W3C XML Schema versions available (see Where to Get the Schemas) for tools that do not yet support RELAX NG.