[whatwg] X/HTML5 and DocBook

[Martin Atkins]

David Latapie wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I never used it, but a common complaint about DocBook is that there is 
> too much tags.
> 
> Now, considering how microformats seems to be the Next Big Thing™ (and 
> we are talking quite a lot on this ML about this technology), could 
> someone with a background in DocBook tell me (us) how 
> X/HTML5+microformats differs from DocBook?
> 
> Please remember I may have wrong ideas about DocBook (or about X/HTML5, 
> for that matter).
> 

I believe the "Simplified DocBook" DTD was invented to address the 
concern that DocBook was too complicated. I've seen Simplified DocBook 
as an attempt to get an "HTML-like" simplicity while retaining the 
powerful structured nature of DocBook documents.

HTML5 comes at this from the other perspective, to a certain extent: 
while Simplified DocBook scaled down DocBook to be more like HTML, HTML5 
adds structure elements to HTML to make it a bit more like DocBook in 
many respects.

Of course, that's not all HTML5 does. Many of HTML5's new features are 
not for "documents" at all, but rather for web applications.