Editing DocBook (section)

=== Sample document ===

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml">
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <book xml:id="simple_book" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0">
   <title>Very simple book</title>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_1">
     <title>Chapter 1</title>
     <para>Hello world!</para>
     <para>I hope that your day is proceeding <emphasis>splendidly</emphasis>!</para>
   </chapter>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_2">
     <title>Chapter 2</title>
     <para>Hello again, world!</para>
   </chapter>
 </book>
</syntaxhighlight>

Semantically, this document is a "book", with a "title", that contains two "chapters" each with their own "titles". Those "chapters" contain "paragraphs" that have text in them. The markup is fairly readable in English.

In more detail, the root element of the document is <code>book</code>. All DocBook elements are in an [[XML Namespace]], so the root element has an ''xmlns'' attribute to set the current namespace. Also, the root element of a DocBook document must have a ''version'' that specifies the version of the format that the document is built on.

(XML documents can include elements from multiple namespaces at once, like the <code>id</code> attributes in the example.)

A <code>book</code> element must contain a <code>title</code>, or an <code>info</code> element containing a <code>title</code>. This must be before any child structural elements. Following the title are the structural children, in this case, two <code>chapter</code> elements. Each of these must have a <code>title</code>. They contain <code>para</code> block elements, which can contain free text and other inline elements like the <code>emphasis</code> in the second paragraph of the first chapter.