On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 10:26:43PM -0500, Larry Kollar wrote: > : > The problem with using XML for documentation is that it was > designed specifically for machine processing -- and *people* > write documents for *other* people.
I agree and think this is _very_ important. groff -mm and -ms attempt to do this, but mixing macros that associate _meaning_ with text with macros that associate _presentation_ with text quickly gets confusing. LaTeX has the same problem to my eye. > The human element has been > tripping up XML doctypes, one after another, for quite a while > now. One can mandate DocBook here, or DITA there, but if you > have to *mandate* you've already failed. Success means an > *embrace* -- and HTML is about the only doctype that has ever > been widely embraced rather than endured. HTML may have been "embraced" but I don't think because it helped people communicate with people. The lack of implimented standards across browsers emphasizes how desparate people were to get their words on the web. > : > Another possibility is that groff itself can do the conversion. > The HTML "driver" has a ways to go yet before being able to > produce beautiful HTML, but what comes out now is close enough > to clean up using some awk scripts and HTML Tidy. So it might > be easier, short- and long-term, to encourage people to add the > -mwww macros to their man pages. I think this is unlikely to work because _meaning_ and _presentation_ markups look alike. I want to write documents with only _meaning_ markup (and as little of that as possible) and have the appearance come from a standardized assignment of _presentation_ to _meaning_. I want to avoid "tweeking" appearance altogether since I firmly believe "our way is better than my way (for all `our ways' I agree with)". I'm working hard on at accumulating lots of `our ways' I agree with by learning to agree more readily. -- Mike Bianchi _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
