Does anyone have any experience of these, as they are doing my head in?
I do. They are used for different purposes, though. xref's are for cross-referencing:
http://sagehill.net/docbookxsl/CrossRefs.html#IdrefLinks
Whereas XIncludes are used to pull another doc into your doc. This provides an alternative to using the "external file as entity" method, and provides for greater flexibility in document composition. (e.g. your XIncluded docs can have prologs) Gotta be careful that your xslt processor knows about XInclude, though. I believe there's a switch for xsltproc... At any rate, I again point you to Bob Stayton's "DocBook XSL" as a reference - pretty sure he covers the essentials:
http://sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ModularDoc.html#UsingXinclude
You might also want to post any specific questions you have to the docbook-apps list - response time is surprisingly quick.
HTH.
Cheers, Mark
-- ---------------------------------------------------------- Mark Johnson <mjohnson@xxxxxxxxxx> OS Product Documentation Engineering, Red Hat, Inc. <http://www.redhat.com> Tel: 919.754.4151 Fax: 919.754.3708 GPG fp: DBEA FA3C C46A 70B5 F120 568B 89D5 4F61 C07D E242
