Peter,
> First of all, moving to DocBook XML will not do anything in the way of
> improving our output processing abilities. Any tool that you can use
> on DocBook SGML can also be used on DocBook XML and vice versa.
>
As I said then, this is absolutely untrue. OpenOffice.org, for example,
works with DocBook XML but not SGML. There are also a plethora of XML
editing and publishing tools which can been used for Docbook XML which
are not available for SGML. A simple look at this page:
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookAuthoringTools
.... shows that there are more than twice as many authoring tools which
support only XML as support SGML -- and that most of the tools which
support SGML are out-of-maintenance.
--Josh Berkus