DocBook is a structured document format that allows you to write a document in SGML (or XML) and then convert it to many different formats. There are two different DTD's for DocBook: one for SGML and one for XML.

I won't talk much about SGML in this document. It's probably more powerful than XML (since XML is a subset of SGML) but I think that XML has more industry support and therefore more interesting possibilities.

Docbook home:http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/
Docbook repository: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook

Docbook per se consists of a "Document Type Definition" or DTD which defines the strcuture of a valid docbook document. There are SGML and XML versions.

XML

Quick Start Guide: http://jimweller.net/jim/dbxmlqs/
Debian HOWTO: http://people.debian.org/~bortz//SGML-HOWTO/potato/howto.html

There are two different DTD's which you might find relevant: the full version and the simplified version. The full version implements the complete set of docbook elements and the simplified version implements a small subset (basically enough to allow you to write articles but not books).

You can serve simplified docbook files directly to modern browsers! Make sure that the content-type is text/xml (set in apache config file mime.types ). Put the DTD and sdocbook.css files somewhere that the browser can find them and you should be off to the races.

-- TobyCabot - 28 Jun 2001