diff --git a/docs/format.html.in b/docs/format.html.in
index 9cb8eee18a..56ec76f438 100644
--- a/docs/format.html.in
+++ b/docs/format.html.in
@@ -2,9 +2,43 @@
 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   <body>
-    <h1 >XML Format</h1>
+    <h1>XML Format</h1>
 
 
+    <p>
+      Objects in the libvirt API are configured using XML documents to allow
+      for ease of extension in future releases. Each XML document has an
+      associated Relax-NG schema that can be used to validate documents
+      prior to usage.
+    </p>
+
+
+    <ul>
+      <li><a href="formatdomain.html" shape="rect">Domains</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatnetwork.html" shape="rect">Networks</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatnwfilter.html" shape="rect">Network filtering</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatstorage.html" shape="rect">Storage</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatstorageencryption.html" shape="rect">Storage encryption</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatcaps.html" shape="rect">Capabilities</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatdomaincaps.html" shape="rect">Domain capabilities</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatnode.html" shape="rect">Node devices</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatsecret.html" shape="rect">Secrets</a></li>
+      <li><a href="formatsnapshot.html" shape="rect">Snapshots</a></li>
+    </ul>
+
+    <h2>Command line validation</h2>
+
+    <p>
+      The <code>virt-xml-validate</code> tool provides a simple command line
+      for validating XML documents prior to giving them to libvirt. It uses
+      the locally instaled RNG schema documents. It will auto-detect which
+      schema to use for validation based on the name of the top level element
+      in the input document. Thus it merely requires the XML document filename
+      to be passed on the command line
+    </p>
+
+    <pre>
+      $ virt-xml-validate /path/to/XML/file</pre>
 
   </body>
 </html>
