XML News from Thursday, September 16, 2004

Norm Walsh has posted the second beta of DocBook 4.4, an XML application designed for technical documentation and books such as Processing XML with Java. New elements in DocBook 4.4 include package and biblioref.

Bob Stayton has posted version 1.66.0 of the DocBook XSL stylesheets. These support transforms to HTML, XHTML, and XSL-FO. Besides bug fixes, major enhancements in this release include:

• Improved handling of olinks
• Can create multiple indices containing different categories of entries
• A section.autolabel.max.depth parameter to turn off section numbering below a certain depth
• Better handling of relative URLs in image references, including xml:base support
• Support for DocBook 4.3 corpcredit element.
• Increased footnote customization

David Holroyd has written a a CSS2 DocBook stylesheet that enables CSS Level 2 savvy web browsers such as Mozilla and Opera to display Docbook XML documents. The results aren't as pretty as what the XSLT stylesheets can produce, but they're serviceable.