Re: [Groff] Re: Simplifying groff documentation

[Eric S. Raymond]

Meg McRoberts <address@hidden>:
> If all this were implemented, would you envision that people writing
> new man pages would write them using -man or would they use docbook?

That would depend on your tradeoff between complexity and control.
Writing in man markup is the simpler way to go, but doesn't give you
as much control over the HTML-rendered result as writing in DocBook
would.
 
> I'm not sure of the solution but it seems that, if they could write in
> docbook, this opens the option of using an XML WYSIWYG editor if necessary.

Indeed it does.  A WYSIWYG editor driven by the RefEntry DTD would be an
excellent thing for writing man pages.
 
> How does this fit into your vision of the future?

Perfectly.  What I'm after isn't to force people to either use new
composition tools or be stuck with old ones.  I'm focused on the user
experience of reading the documentation.  I don't care whether or
not man markup survives as a composition format; what I want is for
it to get out of HTML's way on the presentation end.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>