Re: Macro Archive Relaunch

[Guido Draheim]

Peter Simons schrieb:
> Guido Draheim writes:
>
>  > I am not sure however if it is best to use <br> instead of a proper
>  > list that gets visuallized with as a the list combined with <br>
>  > between them.
>
> IMHO the only viable alternative would be to use an abstract
> description of "macro parameters", which describes semantics. The
> Docbook format does provide something like that, for instance, but I
> thought that this would be excessively complicated for the submitter
> and would probably never be used anyway.

let me first state that it is a good idea to split the technical
parts off the original thread. ;-)

No, actually I would not think of making up a full parameter
description - it might be interesting to attempt such but in
the real world one might argue what effect it has to markup
things into machine-readable format when there is no benefit
from processing it. The invokation-description is surely
meant for the human reader, and a multi-line synopsis showing
examples of possible usage are just great.

However, each synopsis might need its own set of descriptions,
sometimes the number or existance of some argument can change
the actual processing of the macro - at the moment this is
described in prosa in the macro description (I am thinking of
the original autoconf project here) referring to the first
and second invokation format.

There might be the task to bind these more closely, or the
wish to serialize invokation formats into `important` or
`rare` as to omit the latter from some index formats. That
did spawn the idea to markup each invokation synopsis line
by itself as to be able to process it for actual index
formatting.

If such extra index formats are actully useful or currently
in the planning, that is all a different case tho ;-)

-- cheers, guido