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Re: [Groff] The future redux


From: Walter Alejandro Iglesias
Subject: Re: [Groff] The future redux
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 19:00:10 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.22 (2013-10-16)

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:06:09AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Now let us imaging adding two primitives to groff:
>
> 1. Declare hygienic.  Takes a request or macro name, sets a 'hygienic'
> bit on it.
>
> 2. Enable hygienic node.  After this point, all explicit requests without
> their hygienic bit set are disabled and cause a fatal error.  They
> can only be used within hygienic macro expansions.
>
> Given this pair of primitives, backward compatibility and the goal of
> achieving semantic markup in groff would no longer be in conflict.
> Instead, macro packages get to choose where they sit on the
> structured-vs.-expressive continuum by what set of requests they
> allow.
>
> At one end of the continuum, the man macros would disable all but a
> dozen or so macros and a handful of relatively tractable low-level
> requests (mostly font-change escapes).  Rendering this restricted set
> to decent HTML would be trivial.  There would be some bitching from a
> small percentage of man page authors who would have to clean up their
> markup, but from working on doclifter I know exactly where to set the
> bar so those compaints would be less than 1% by volume.
>
> At the other end of the continuum would be full, old-fashioned groff
> with no hygiene. People like Mike Bianchi would feel at home there.
>
> Within the project, the importance of this one bit of mechanism is
> thay it would allow us to sidestep a lot of thorny policy debates. In
> effect, groff would bifurcate - one class of its markups freed to become
> tighter and more structural, the other cultivating full presentation-
> level expressiveness.
>

Eric,

Assuming you have not enough time to do it yourself, what I would do
in your place is to pay someone to write the html of your site and
replace DocBook with PHP scripting.  Your site will win in quality and
functionality and that will be by far more hygienic than encouraging
someone to convert groff in some kind of swiss army knife.

Other point.  Why the need to convert to html?  Why not to use pdf
online?  Today you can read pdf comfortably from internet.  Web bots
(like google) read them.  No lose.



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