Does anyone else have the feeling that Docbook was killed by XML? 20 years ago, there was Docbook, an SGML application. There was also Linuxdoc SGML, another,

Does anyone else have the feeling that Docbook was killed by XML? 20 years ago, there was Docbook, an SGML application. There was also Linuxdoc SGML, another, simpler SGML application for us common people. You had to write the SGML in an ordinary text editor, but the markup isn't too obtrusive. Stylesheets were written in DSSSL (essentially Scheme) and processed with Jade. Output was either HTML or flow objects, which could be processed by TeX to get nice postscript. There were also some shortcuts to produce Unix man pages. And then the whole world apparently decided that SGML is bad and XML is good, and started over. Markup became annoying, DSSSL was replaced with XSLT, which should not be looked at with unprotected eyes, instead of Jade we got Apache Xalan(?), which needed a supercomputer to run (thank you, Java) and was generally a pain to use (again, thank you, Java), and it produced either HTML or XSL:FO, and there was no working processor for the latter, so there was no longer a good way to produce PS or PDF. It took a few years until xsltproc finally made XSLT usable (but still not pretty to look at), and Apache FOP could format to PDF (when running on a supercomputer, just like Xalan). But nobody wrote their documentation in Docbook or Linuxdoc anymore. Because markdown and asciidoc and a bazillion similar ad-hoc languages may not have been as theoretically clean, but at least the tools worked, even on a cheap workstation.