Elliotte Rusty Harold W. Scott Means Introducing XML XML as a Document Format XML as a "better" HTML XML is first and foremost a document format. It was always intended for web pages, books, scholarly articles, poems, short stories, reference manuals, tutorials, texts, legal pleadings, contracts, instruction sheets, and other documents that human beings would read. Its use as a syntax for computer data in applications like syndication, order processing, object serialization, database exchange and backup, electronic data interchange, and so forth is mostly a happy accident. DocBook is an SGML application designed for new documents, not old ones. It's especially common in computer documentation. Several O'Reilly books have been written in DocBook including Norm Walsh and Leonard Muellner's DocBook: The Definitive Guide. Much of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) corpus is written in DocBook. SGML, 8, 89 DocBook, 95-98 TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), 92-95 Text Encoding Initiative TEI