Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]>:
> The classical man(7) language is a purely presentational language
> and contains exactly three semantic macros as exceptions: TH, SH, SS.
> So basically, nothing except titles is semantic in there.
You left out the mnost common one: .P.
I'm aware that we're stuck with presentation-level markup in man macros.
You're right, we have too large a legacy problem there to move to
a purely semantic markup. I am less bothered by this than I might be
because doclifter exists and works.
What we can do, though, is look for ways to (a) reduce the inventory of
low-level troff requests a man-page renderer has to support, and (b)
further enrich the semantic content so that renderers can do a better
job without having to ve as complex as doclifter.
No, I don't have anything specific in mind for (b) yet.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>