OASIS ballot: DocBook DTD

[Karl Best <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

OASIS members:

The DocBook Technical Committee has submitted to OASIS the latest version of
the DocBook DTD, and asks that the OASIS membership vote to approve it as an
OASIS Specification. The submission meets the requirements of the technical
committee process (see http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process.shtml),
as follows:

1. The DocBook Technical Committee has submitted DocBook v4.1.2, an XML
version of the DTD, and v4.1, an SGML version of the DTD, and certifies that
these are valid DTDs of their type. The DTDs may be found at
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/ and
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/sgml/4.1/

2. The submission is documented. DocBook 3.1 was fully documented by
DocBook: The Definitive Guide at http://docbook.org/tdg/. The changes
introduced in DocBook 4 have not yet been integrated into TDG, but they are
available at http://docbook.org/tdg/40updates/

3. The English-language summary of the specification is as follows:

DocBook is a DTD maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS. It
is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and
software (though it is by no means limited to these applications).

Because it is a large and robust DTD, and because its main structures
correspond to the general notion of what constitutes a "book," DocBook has
been adopted by a large and growing community of authors writing books of
all kinds. DocBook is supported "out of the box" by a number of commercial
tools, and there is rapidly expanding support for it in a number of free
software environments. These features have combined to make DocBook a
generally easy to understand, widely useful, and very popular DTD. Dozens of
organizations are using DocBook for millions of pages of documentation, in
various print and online formats, worldwide.

4. Three OASIS members have certified to me that they are sucessfully using
the specification. They are Sun Microsystems (Norm Walsh), Arbortext (Paul
Grosso), and CommerceOne (Terry Allen).

5. There were no previous unsucessful ballots for this submission, so no
account of comments is required.

6. The archives for the discussions of the DocBook Technical Committee  are
available at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/


As specified by the Technical Committee Process, balloting takes place as
follows:

- The OASIS membership has 30 days to respond to this ballot; balloting will
close on 31 October 2000. One vote from each OASIS member organization is
allowed; an organization may change its vote by sending in another vote up
until the close of balloting.

- Votes should be sent to tc-voting@lists.oasis-open.org. You should state
the name of the OASIS member organization and the vote, e.g. "XYZ
Corporation votes YES on the DocBook specification." Archives of votes are
available at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-voting/

- I will announce the results of the ballot within seven days of the end of
the voting period.

I request that the voting representative of each OASIS member organization
return a ballot on this proposal.

</karl>
============================================================
Karl F. Best
OASIS - Director, Technical Operations
978.667.5115 x206
karl.best@oasis-open.org  http://www.oasis-open.org