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Postings from March 2005
Aaron Sherman wrote: >>Sam "mugwump" Vilain refers to each of these syntaxes as /Pod dialects/. >>He is working on more formally defining the common model or "AST" that >>these dialects map to. > Why? Seriously, why on earth do you want to encourage the proliferation > of variant markup languages?! There aren't enough? > My effort here was to try to PREVENT the proliferation (e.g. by Kwid and > POD butting heads and ending up in a stalemate). The only problem is > that, presented with a compromise, the Kwid folks seem to be content to > ADD it to the list of variants rather than, in fact, compromise and > collapse the list. > I'll continue only as far as is needed to propose this in full as an > example parser / converter, and then I'm going to stop. My goal is not > to proliferate the number of markups further, and I'd MUCH rather see > Perl 6 rely on POD than fragment the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT TASK in > creating code to share with the world: documentation. Well, I don't think anyone wants to see as many POD dialects as there are wiki text formats (BBCode, anyone?). Maybe there will be something very close to the original POD, but with a verbose way of making tables, and an enhanced linking syntax. But otherwise identical to the original Perl 5 POD. Note that POD dialects, and differing POD conventions already exist in Perl 5 and are in common use. They were designed in the original POD with the =for tag. At the moment, tools like `pod2html' have to be heavily aware of the POD dialect, which I think is sub-optimal when it comes to some of the really interesting things people have achieved with POD. Look at MarkOv's OODoc, or Test::Inline, for instance. All I'm trying to do is giving these beasts a name, and defining a mechanism by which they can be used by tools that only know how to deal with "standard" documents - thus giving users the freedom to define a local convention if one of them doesn't quite fit their needs. Using a local Subversion repository, and Request Tracker, and want to be able to put hyperlinks in POD to refer to these entities? No problem, just extend the dialect and add a link style. Then select from a dozen output tools or variants to see which one works for you. Sam.Thread Previous | Thread Next