On Mon Jan 20, 2025 at 10:22 PM CET, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> T. Kurt Bond wrote on Mon, Jan 20, 2025 at 12:57:16PM -0500:
> > Branden said:
> >> As far as I know, none of pod2man(1), asciidoctor(1), docutils(1),
> >> or pandoc(1) supports a syntax for inlining "raw" man(7)/*roff
> >> source into a document.
>
> Since this point keeps getting discussed, i'll briefly mention
> that, when designing a markup language, permitting the inclusion
> of chunks written in a different markup language is usually
> terrible language design.
>
> The point of a markup language is to support a variety of output
> formats [...]
That's not always true; HTML is a markup language too, after all,
and it's very tightly integrated with the Web to the point of often
not being easily convertible to other media.
> Designing your language such that authors can inline a different
> language restricts your new language to essentially support only
> that single output language that can be inlined, so it makes your
> whole new language essentially pointless. [...]
There are many languages which were created to serve as an abstraction
over a language deemed too complicated or unwieldy. See markdown, which
was originally designed to simplify writing stuff on the web[1] and its
original spec even allows embedding HTML tags into it, or scdoc, which
is something like markdown for man.
~ onf
[1] The way in which static site generators like hugo use it is likely
what it was intended for.
