The problem

You have to write the documentation of an advanced technical product (software, hardware, service, etc) and you are not sure which technology or tool is the best choice for doing this.

You have already excluded the idea of using a word processor such as Microsoft Word because this documentation, besides being expected to be very large (several hundreds of pages long, hundreds of cross-references, dozens of tables and figures, an extensive index, etc), is mainly intended to be published online as a set of HTML pages.

You have of course heard about DITA and DocBook and about XML Editors and Content Management Systems having built-in support for these technologies. However these XML vocabularies are so large and so complex that you are already discouraged. Moreover you have heard that converting DITA or DocBook documents to deliverables looking right requires you to delve at best, into XSL, and at worst, into the arcanes of advanced conversion toolkits.

The HTML solution

The most important format for your deliverables being HTML, why not directly write your technical documentation in HTML and style it using CSS?

At first this seems to be a great idea but you must realize, even with the help of a good HTML editor, you'll lack many of the features provided by DITA or DocBook and their conversion toolkits:

In fact, this HTML approach can work but you need more than an HTML editor for that. You need a tool letting you create and publish full books —not just pages— in HTML. Some of these tools are:

We'll now explain