Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't yet understand what the point of .LS is - in my experience, > assembling items from .IP and .TP blocks to form lists is *not* > among the problems the man(7) language causes - quite to the contrary, > even though HTML is a strongly structural and semantic language, > assembling even HTML code from .IP and .TP is a almost never a > problem, and i don't see which other target format could possibly > be harder to handle than HTML. Wow. I think that’s the first time a structured doc advocate (besides myself) has ever described HTML as "a strongly structural and semantic language.” Even I’ve described it as “semi-structured,” or even “structured enough.” It’s not difficult to parse HTML with XSLT, although I hasten to say that XSLT isn’t my favorite scripting language (I learned it because I figured I’d need it, and I did). But I have to wonder about "i don't see which other target format could possibly be harder to handle than HTML.” A lot of projects have put a lot of effort into targeting HTML output, and they’re largely successful. I’d suggest DITA as a harder target, but even the default DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) can uplift Markdown into usable DITA. Indeed, I used Markdown as a transitional format to import Word and other documents into DITA… one time, I forgot to do the uplift and produced a decent-looking PDF from the Markdown topics. /digress Anyway, .LS/.LE … is the phrase “syntactic sugar” still in vogue? I can see how it would be a lot easier to transform a manpage using those wrappers. Sure, you can do it without the wrappers (the original Markdown.pl script does it and does it well), but someone trying to do a custom transform will get it done a lot faster with the wrappers. — Larry
