7. Who are the projects and the players?
The DocBook DTD itself is maintained by the DocBook Technical
Committee, headed by Norman Walsh. Norm is the principal author of
the DocBook stylesheets, a man who has focused remarkable energy and
talent over many years on the extremely complex problems DocBook
addresses. He is as universally respected in the DocBook
community as Linus Torvalds is in the Linux world.
libxslt is a C
library that interprets XSLT, applying stylesheets to XML documents.
It includes a wrapper program, xsltproc, that can be
used as an XML formatter. The code was written by Daniel Veillard
under the auspices of the GNOME project, but does not require any
GNOME code to run. I hear it's blazingly fast compared to the
Java alternatives, not a surprising claim.
xmlto is the
user interface of the XML toolchain that Red Hat ships. It's written
and maintained by Tim Waugh.
Saxon
and Xalan are Java
programs that interpret XSLT. Saxon seems to be designed to work
under Windows. Xalan is part of the XML Apache project and native to
Linux and BSD; it's designed to work with FOP.
FOP translates
XML Formatting Objects to PDF. It is part of the Apache XML project
and is designed to work with Xalan.