We definitely need a good guide for writing man pages, based on our discussion -- something like a man-to-html.howto. This guide should contain (as an appendix) those macro definitions which a man writer can then simply copy and paste.
I agree. Ironically, what we have is currently in texinfo. :-) P.S. I know that Eric is shooting for something more dynamic, but does this have to be made anymore complicated than a better export facility for groff (improvements or replace for grohtml that is both standardized for HTML, and perhaps has an XSLT function for a simplified XHTML or XML doc)? It seems that if DocBook wants to do something with man pages, why don't they provide an import function? Of course, to quote Santayana out of context, I'm overlooking half the facts and half the difficulties to find some key to the whole, but I'm finding this discussion uncomfortably arbitrary. There's enough problems in the symantic web world that a dynamic system along Eric's thinking seems premature or superfluous, or perhaps visionary in scope if adopted, but as Zvezdan pointed out, to Ada or to Java? Why either? If groff adopts something, shouldn't it be to the interest of roff documentation and function? Classic roff is print documentation, and online manuals. It was originally pushed to give UNIX a reason to exist. TeX and texinfo replaced it for GNU, because dit/t/nroff was not free, but is now with groff (and now Caldera's release of old BSD code that has the original sources). roff is a system that has never been replaced, and that most of us still find to be the most efficient thing out there. Do we need more than export facilities? Is there a new function for groff that is being pursued? If online documentation is what is intended, I'd rather write those directly in HTML, or XHTML, or some other XML schema, and avoid roff, or if originally written in roff, converted to HTML for online reference. Am I completely missing the point, and being ignorant? _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
