Although a lot of these topics can be used for both versions with minimal changes, this book focuses on DocBook 5. Why? There are several reasons:
DocBook 4 is in maintenance mode and DocBook 5 is the future.
I wanted to show exhaustive examples for DocBook 5. With this book, I hope, users can learn how to adopt and use it.
It is easy to transform DocBook 4 into version 5 as shown in Section 3.3, “Converting DocBook from Version 4 to Version 5”.
It simplifies writing a lot if you can concentrate on only one version and not on two. It is also easier to read for you.
The differences are documented in the DocBook5: The Definitive Guide book, section What’s New in DocBook V5.0?.
Apart from the DocBook examples, the transformation examples are currently based on the DocBook XSL 1.0 stylesheets. They are stable, well-documented and can be used with any XSLT 1.0 processor.
On the other side, there is always the tension between implementing new concepts and retaining backward compatibility. For this reason, the XSLT 1.0 stylesheets are rewritten for XSLT 2.0. This task is not finished yet. As soon as they are production-stable, they will be covered in this book too.
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