xincluding every child nodes of an element in docbook5

[Robert Fekete <frobert@balabit.com>]

Hi DocBook Gurus,

We are in the middle of upgrading to Docbook 5.1b7, and have run into the 
following issue.

We validate our Docbook 5 docs with Jing (and have patched the underlying Xerces 
to handle xml:ids in xincludes), and build the output with xsltproc.
(For docbook 4 we used xmllint+xsltproc, but AFAIK xmllint does not properly 
handle the schematron rules of docbook 5.)

My problem is, that our documents heavily use xincludes using the xpointer 
scheme, but this is not supported in Xerces, therefore I cannot validate it. For 
example:
<xi:include href="reference_common.xml" xpointer="xpointer(//simplesect[@id = 
'destination_commonoption_flags']/node() )" 
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/>

I would like to rework these xincludes so that:
- they are valid
- they build
- I need to be able to include every child of a node, but without the original 
parent node, based on the ID of the parent
- the element to be included is typically not the root node of the file
- I need to use the ID as a reference in the xinclude

For example, I have a file that contains a bunch of simplesects that have 
multiple child nodes:
<simplesect id="id1">
    <title></title>
    <para></para>
    <para></para>
</simplesect>
<simplesect id="id2">
    <title></title>
    <para></para>
    <itemizedlist></itemizedlist>
</simplesect>

What is the proper way to xinclude the contents of <simplesect id="id2">?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Robert Fekete