The O'Reilly Network has a new article posted for all of those out there that are looking to make writing large documentation/publications much simpler.

In Writing "Learning PHP 5", David Sklar talks about how he used the DocBook Lite XML format to generate his chapters. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach, of course. The XML has issues with the code examples it comes across (corrected with a CDATA block) as well as some of the sample code archive information.

Each chapter (and appendix) is its own file, formatted with the Docbook Lite XML dialect. I used XEmacs to edit the files. XEmacs's xml-mode provides helpful assistance with well-formedness checking and context-sensitive tag insertion. It also works with XEmacs' font-lock mode to make tags, attributes, and other XML goodies appear in pretty colors for easier readability.

[...] To submit chapters (or parts of chapters), I used a CVS repository and a mailing list. When I had new material for the editors and tech reviewers to examine, I committed it to the CVS repository. Commit messages went to the mailing list. Reviewers could read the new material and either commit changes and comments of their own or email me or the list with suggestions and new materials.

I have to admit, this is a very cool way to do it, allowing the flexibility of XML to join with the simplicity of DocBook - throw in Emacs and you have a simple, clean work environment...