Docs Format

[Laurențiu Nicola]

LLMs love XML: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/claude-prompting-best-practices#structure-prompts-with-xml-tags

Laurentiu

On Tue, Jun 9, 2026, at 20:03, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> Speaking of things that need their own thread, Darafei said:
>
>> Another thing that may be useful to get raised: how tied are we to having docs as xml? I think gdal moved to rst and it has made it a little easier to navigate the sources of the docs on the file level.
>
> I would say we are mostly tied to XML insofar as changing is a lot of
> work, but also in that we are generating per-function pages that are
> great for PostGIS SEO. Any rst/md replacement would have to be able to
> generate those too.
>
> Regina would probably also note that the strict function formatting in
> docbook lets us find automatically when docs and SQL defs are out of
> sync, and also generate SQL comments for the functions automatically,
> and also generate categorizations of the functions.
>
> I would say that LLMs are probably not a great motivator to change, as
> I am sure they deal with the markup just fine and don't care that it
> is "hard to read" and "harder to write".
>
> I think I would like to see a migration before signing on to a big change.
>
> P