Re: [Groff] Mission statement

[Peter Schaffter]

Eric --

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> - Increased use of browsers shifts the commonest use cases for man pages
>   in a direction that rewards structural rather than presentational markup.  

This is a tad OT, but do you know for a fact there's an increased
use of browsers to read man pages?  Other than can be accounted for
by Windroids coming to a free Unix for the first time and feeling
more comfortable with a brower than the terminal?  Is it enough to
warrant saying things are shifting?  The first half of the sentence
all seems rather vague but dovetails perfectly into the stylish
conclusion, so I smell a wee bit of the writer's art here.

I remember reading manpages in a browser for a while, back when it
was cool that you could do it at all, but I quickly switched back
to the terminal.  Why?  Because everything I ever wanted to consult
a manpage for was something I'd be doing at the terminal.  I won't
bet the farm on it, but I'm pretty sure that's the case for most
Unix users.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca