FYI, I have never used DocBook (so far), but if you want to name your
files .xml or something instead of .sgml, you should be able to use
something like the below to tell emacs to still use SGML mode for
those files. This example binds .adp files to html-mode:
;; Set additional editing modes.
(setq auto-mode-alist
(append '(
(".adp$" . html-mode)
;; insert other modes here
) auto-mode-alist))
Btw, I am no emacs-lisp expert so the above may not be the best way to
do it. But it seems to work.