Copyright
Copyright 2005, Samuel Penn.
Redistribution and use in source, binary and printed forms with or without modification is permitted. See the full license text for details.
Copyright 2005, Samuel Penn.
Redistribution and use in source, binary and printed forms with or without modification is permitted. See the full license text for details.
Yagsbook is an XML format specifically designed for the mark up of roleplaying game content. It was originally based on DocBook. A Yagsbook document can support multiple types of game systems (allowing d20 and GURPS content to be included side by side for example) and rendered to multiple output formats - currently HTML and PDF are supported.
The advantage over using other document formats (such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or plain HTML) is that document content is structured, and is capable of expressing terms unique to roleplaying games. Skills, characters, spells and items can all be defined using rich XML. This enables objects to be processed and used by other software, or for data to be presented in different ways (skill lists can be defined once, then displayed alphabetically, sorted by groups or filtered according to importance).
Related to Yagsbook is PageXML, which was designed to markup the documentation for the former. DocBook wasn't considered suitable enough, since it can't easily document XML - PageXML includes markup for describing XML documents and pretty-printing them to a website. This website was written using PageXML.
PageXML also includes hooks in Yagsbook, for importing articles and auto-generating encyclopedias as part of the website.
Finally there is Yagsbook Encyclopedia, which takes a collection of Yagsbook articles, and organises them into an online Encyclopedia. The purpose of this is to allow campaign documentation to be quickly organised and published.
XML Schemas are provided for validation of Yagsbook documents. Currently, the schemas are far from complete, and the best 'documentation' are the stylesheets.
While there are plans to complete the Schemas, there are no plans to provide DTDs for Yagsbook.
As the schemas are defined, it is likely that Yagsbook will change, since the writing of proper definitions will lead to a clearer, more concise, format. This may break compatibility with previous versions of Yagsbook.
XSLT is used to turn the XML documents into either HTML or PDF format (via XSL-FO). The schemas are currently the best documentation for what is supported by Yagsbook.
