"new" XML language for phpdoc?

Hi! After getting home from the doc meeting, I decided to propose this idea about having a simplified XML language on top of DocBook for phpdoc stuff. This idea may be completely useless, or may be accepted to implement in the future. First it seemed to me a good idea, so I decided to write it down. This does not mean, that it is good at all ;) I) *So* what is the problem? We have problems with some really cluttered DocBook elements. Just think about a listitem. You always need to put at least a simpara into a listitem. What do you need to insert if you would like to put in some PHP code? A programlisting with role="php"... And I think everybody remembers the discussions about using a container tag for see alsos, and a list tag in it, with paras in each list item, with the linked endpoint in each para. Huh. II) *So* how can we solve the problem? a) Macros in editors and/or using XML editors... Advantage: no need to modify xml files and/or the used language Problem: sometimes you have no XML editor at hand, and this won't make our XML code readable. Cluttered xml files. b) Customize DocBook, write own stye sheets for processing new tags, and customize the DTD Advantage: using our own tags, readable XML files Problem: there are ready made tools for docbook, and this would make the usage of those tools impossible or at least hard c) Build a new language on top of DocBook, and provide some simple conversion style sheets from our language to DocBook. Advantage: using our own tags, readable XML files, simple DTD (only those tags we use) Problem: more processing time, DocBook as an intermediary language Now I would like to extend point c) as this is a new idea (and quite interesting in my eyes). This may be good for our needs. So what about inventing some shortcut tags for our problematic parts add some tags to DocBook, remove those we never use and name the language eg. PHPBook. This way we would have a simple language, which we can convert to DocBook anytime to use the DocBook tools already available. What we only need to do is to run a simple 1-2KB XSLT sheet on all XML files before we run the HTML / FO sheets on them. I don't think so that the [probably very small] performance decrease would be less then the ease of editing. An example: DocBook: <itemizedlist> <listitem> <simpara> text in here </simpara> </listitem> <listitem> <simpara> more text in here </simpara> </listitem> </itemizedlist> PHPBook: <itemizedlist> <listitempara> text in here </listitempara> <listitempara> more text in here </listitempara> </itemizedlist> For php codes: <programlisting role="php"> <![CDATA[ php code here ]]> </programlisting> <phpcode> <![CDATA[ php code here ]]> </phpcode> So this would be a wrapper around DocBook, as we can map all our new tags to DocBook equivalents with *extremely* simple XSLT sheets. This way we can invent any easy XML syntaxes for see also lists for example, like: <seealsolist> <function>echo</function> <link linkend="configure.session">Session stuff</link> </seealsolist> Then we can convert this automatically to any valid DocBook XML stuff to take advantage of ready made XSLT sheets and conversion programs. I can volunteer in the creation of these simple XSLT sheets, and the PHPBook DTD (simplified and extended DocBook) if we can come up with some structures to ease our lives. And remember, that this idea may be completely useless, but may be good enough to implement. We need more discussion on this ;) Goba