> DocBook is a means to an end; nobody really wants DocBook itself as far > as I can tell.
We only have docbook because it was the tool of choice rather a lot of years ago to then get useful output formats. It was just inherited when borrowed the original scripts from Gnome/Gtk. It's still the most effective way IMHO of building big structured documents out of the kernel. The Gtk people long ago rewrote the original document script into a real tool so they have some different and maintained tools that are close to equivalent and already have some markdown support. Before we go off and re-invent the wheel it might be worth just borrowing their wheel and tweaking it as needed ? In particular they can generate help indexes so that the entire output becomes nicely browsable with an HTML based help browser. Alan
