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Re: [Groff] manpage and groff -mandoc -Thtml


From: Chuck Martin
Subject: Re: [Groff] manpage and groff -mandoc -Thtml
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 15:14:37 -0400
User-agent: Mutt/1.4i

On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 04:16:41PM +0200, Jonas Jermann wrote:
>     - some newlines were added due to the html paragraph <p>
>       (it always adds a newline afterwards)

I hate to be pedantic, but this isn't true.  HTML is not a document
layout language, in spite of the efforts of so many to use it as one.
It's a mark-up language.  All <p> does is tell the browser that a new
paragraph is to start at this point.  It doesn't say how that paragraph
should look.  The fact that the most popular web browsers insert a blank
line is irrelevant.  A browser could just as easily run all paragraphs
together with no blank lines in between, and instead indent the first
line a number of spaces, and be totally correct.  This is one of my pet
peaves regarding the way most web pages are done, which is that their
authors don't understand the simple concept that it should be the person
viewing the page who determines how the page should look rather than the
person who creates the page.

This is one of the problems in converting a man page to HTML.  If you
really want it to look like a man page, you should be putting the
formatted page between <PRE> and </PRE> tags.  Any other attempts at
making it look a certain way shows a lack of understanding of what HTML
is intended to do.

Chuck


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