Writing a book in XML

["Harbarth, Juliane" <Juliane.Harbarth@softwareag.com>]

Good morning,

assumed I like to write a book (well a big document) in XML, I would
probably use docbook since it is mature and there are already lots of
conveniances for it (stylesheets, etc). Then the whole document would
really be one big XML document which has many advantages. 

When doing some writing task together with others usually something like
Subversion or CVS gets used and the 'book' is represented as a tree of
files (chapters, sections) that allows people to work concurrently at
different chapters, or even at the same chapter given the merge
facilities.

What I would like to have is the advantages of both mechanisms at once,
i.e. have the book in one file and have the file physically represented
as separate chunks to be applicable to a version control tool. What
first comes to mind is external entities, but I don't feel good with
these and there is currently a debate here (meaning xml-dev) that goes
into the same direction (see 'Parsing without resolving entities'). What
about XInclude? Is there something obvious here that I am overlooking?
This must be a routine question, is there a routine answer to it?

Thanks & regards,
Juliane.
 
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