“Simplified” DocBook
“The source for documentation.”Simplified DocBook was a community project; not an official product of the DocBook Technical Committee.
Over the years, the notion of a "simple" DocBook subset has come up many times. It has been observed that the number of elements in DocBook can be a little overwhelming to the new user.
The schema is an attempt to make a small subset of DocBook. The goals of this subset are:
- Documents written in the subset must be 100% legal DocBook documents.
- This subset for single documents (articles, white papers, etc.), so there's no need for books or sets, just ‘articles’.
- The markup should be the smallest practical subset, if you need richly
structured markup, use full DocBook. In particular, the subset often
selects a single element from a family of related elements; for
example,
programlistingis provided, butscreenis not.
(Another goal was to have it work in the browser; so it was XML not SGML, back in the day. Of course, that may be a bit pointless soon.)
- The current version is Simplified DocBook 5.2, defined with RELAX NG and Schematron
A couple of earlier versions were also published, based on DocBook 4.x:
- Simplified 1.1, a customization of DocBook 4.3 defined with a DTD.
- Simplified 1.0, a customization of DocBook 4.2 defined with a DTD.