Re: DOCBOOK: Technical DTDs vs. non-technical

[Terry Allen <tallen@sonic.net>]

>DocBook was "primarily written for books about computer software and
hardware". "Because its main structures correspond to the general notion of
what constitutes a "book,", it is assumed that it automatically addresses
the needs of Literature in general.

Not really; it was a design goal (of mine) to make Docbook suitable
also for scholarly publishing.  So if you toss out all the computer-
related inlines and structures, and ignore some things like QandASet
that you probably don't need, you ought to have a DTD that you can
use to format a scholarly book.  If you find deficiencies we'd
like to hear of them.  

Several folks pointed you to TEI, and remarked that it's mostly 
oriented to analysis - and if that's what you want, then you should
use TEI.  For example, if you want to mark up <couplet> you need
TEI; if you only want to typeset a poem, <literallayout> will do.

TEI also covers genres Docbook doesn't, such as plays and (I think)
dictionary entries.  

regards, Terry