You will notice an unusually large number of changes, and especially entry deletions before 4.4.0. I did Google searches to check on entries that I suspected were not actually live. As a result, the amount of junk and noise in the file has been greatly reduced. I wish I could have done this years sooner.

The Jargon File has undergone a major format change, from Texinfo to XML-DocBook. The most immediate consequences of this are that (a) the File now has pictures and cartoons, (b) the ‘one big file’ version is gone, (c) the URLS to entries have changed, and (d) there is a real change log page now.

The one-big-file version would no longer be very useful, because the File now includes images and uses a CSS stylesheet. I had planned to preserve all relative URLs into the site, but there now seems little point since I had to change websites in January 2003.

Getting rid of the nasty pile of hacks and kluges that the Texinfo machinery had grown into was a Good Thing. Maintenance of the Jargon File will now be much simpler, and change tracking will work much better. We apologize for any inconvenience the change may cause.

Also, the archive of old versions now contains text versions of every release we have been able to recover. A few very early releases (2.1.[234], 2.9[1-57-9]) are still missing.