Re: man pages & info prefer HTML format

[Dragan Simic]

On 2023-09-24 15:47, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> On 9/24/23 14:37, Dennis German wrote:
> > After the  years and fine tuning of basic HTML, why aren't the man 
> > pages
> > standardized to HTML format?
> >
> > Perhaps some users don't frequently enough reference man pages as they
> > should and fewer use info , but (nearly) everyone uses a browser.
>
> Sorry, I don't get the point.
>
> HTML might be nice to read, but it's cumbersome to write.
> Authors do not want to care about formatting too much.
> Therefore, the documentation - both the man pages and the Texinfo 
> manual -
> is maintained in formats which are easy to write and track.

Good point.  Another popular format, markdown, just confirms that the 
ease of writing is very important, together with the ability to view the 
source as-is, with no rendering applied, and to still be able to read 
it.

> Besides viewing them with their principal reader (man, info, pinfo, 
> ..),
> those formats allow the conversion to several other nice formats ...
> among them HTML.
>
> The Texinfo manual is rendered into various formats: HTML, PDF, DVI, 
> ASCII.
>   https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/
>
> And also the man pages are available online in HTML format:
>   https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/

... and on many other web sites.

> Have a nice day,
> Berny