Questions about DocBook 5.x

[Ellyn Larson <elarson@portalyx.com>]

Hello DocBook folks,

We are long time DocBook users, but I've been out of the development for
some time. It's nice to see that you are looking at moving DocBook V4.5
to OASIS Standard, as it's been a long time since an update.

After all of the hype of DITA, we are still looking for a good
publishing oriented DTD/schema. Although we may also use DITA to store
and manage data, I still think there is a lot of relevance for DocBook
for output, and for many situations also for input. I really like a lot
of what is happening in DocBook 5.x. I've been working with 5.0b5, and
am very impressed.

We are building an internal application and want to migrate to a newer
version of DocBook (currently at V4.1.2 of the XML DTD). We can be quite
flexible with our data, and want to use DocBook and associated apps
"out-of-the-box" as much as possible. Due to some of the
"backwards-incompatible" changes for 5.x, I think that because we are
doing a total rebuild, I would rather do it in 5.x. So far in testing,
the db4-upgrade.xsl conversion of legacy documents from DocBook 4.x to
DocBook V5.0 seems to be working well.

Constraints:
--------------
We are doing this migration stepwise, because we need to support both
XML DTD and W3C XML Schema. In future we may look to RELAX NG support,
but other integrated apps do not support it enough at this time. We also
need W3C MathML 2.0 and are using DocBook XSLT (1.70.0). We also hope to
use the DITA OpenToolkit to DocBook.

Questions:
--------------
1) In a general view, would you recommend jumping into 5.x now? I
realise that the DTD/Schema versions are "not normative". How "not
normative" are they -- scale of 1 (being MSXML) to 5 (being a strong
parser)?

2) Is it reasonable to think we can integrate W3C MathML 2.0 DTD with
DocBook 5.x?  I have some problems with "XLINK.prefix" and would rather
know if it is "doable" before I dive in. BTW, it would not be a bad idea
to include in the documentation "Extending the DocBook DTD with the
MathML DTD".

Many thanks for reading this long message. I hope my time away from
DocBook has not rendered me totally clueless (apologies in advance;-)

Kind regards,
Ellyn Larson
Portalyx, The Netherlands