WikiTexi will operate on a logical well-structured XML representation of documents. Translation to readable forms (e.g. HTML, TexInfo, PDF) will be accomplished through application of XSLT stylesheets to the core document. WikiTexi will be designed to support any XML where visible content occurs as data (rather than within tags). For example, well-formed HTML could be maintained within WikiTexi.

Initially, WikiTexi will focus on the Docbook XML markup structure. Much thinking has already been done regarding publishing Docbook XML (see http://ibiblio.org/guylhem/PR and http://nwalsh.com/docbook/procdiagram/index.html for examples).

Free software for Docbook transalation remains tenuously reliable at best. Steve Chang's DocBook2X package presents the most hope, as its TexInfo support is XSL-based. However, the packing is unstable. Sebastian Rahtz's PassiveTeX, in conjunction with a DocBook-to-XSL:FO stylesheet allows TeX typesetting. A key objective of WikiTexi is to hide the ugliness of the conversions from the documenters themselves, thus createing a "write-once, publish-however" environment.