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Norm already posted a nice piece about creating subsets of DocBook. His solution allows you to easily remove unwanted elements from DocBook grammar. For example, if you want DocBook without recursive sections (you are preferring sect1–sect5), you can easily create custom schema that will forbid usage of this element.

include "docbook.rnc"
{
  db.section = notAllowed
}

We are using fact, that for each DocBook element in the schema, there is a corresponding named pattern labeled with db. prefix. You can use notAllowed RELAX NG pattern to disable this pattern, effectively removing element from the schema.

This works well for elements, but you might also want to remove some attributes. Suppose that we want to remove linking attributes (linkend and XLink) from general elements. Attributes in the DocBook schema are also defined using several named patterns. There is pattern db.common.linking.attributes which defines attributes we want to remove. My first attempt for removing those attributes was following element removal process:

include "docbook.rnc"
{
  db.common.linking.attributes = notAllowed
}

But if you will try to validate any DocBook V5.0 document with this schema, you get errors like “unknown element "article" from namespace "http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"”. Why? Because the way RELAX NG simplification works. This notAllowed pattern is propagated to element level, because declaration like (it is little bit simplified from the actual schema):

db.article = element article
{
  db.common.linking.attributes,
  db.….attributes,
  content model
}

will be substituted by:

db.article = element article
{
  notAllowed,
  db.….attributes,
  content model
}

and this means that element article is not allowed to appear in a document.

Fortunately RELAX NG offers pattern empty which is ignored when occurring inside group. Thus we can use it for disabling attributes.

# This DocBook variant omits section element and
# linking attributes from general non-linking elements

include "docbook.rnc"
{
  db.section = notAllowed
  db.common.linking.attributes = empty
}

To summarize it. If you need to remove element from DocBook, use notAllowed. If you need to remove attribute(s) from DocBook, use empty pattern.