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Re: [Groff] Back to the future


From: Eric S. Raymond
Subject: Re: [Groff] Back to the future
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 11:54:11 -0500
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden>:
> The classical man(7) language is a purely presentational language
> and contains exactly three semantic macros as exceptions: TH, SH, SS.
> So basically, nothing except titles is semantic in there.

You left out the mnost common one: .P.

I'm aware that we're stuck with presentation-level markup in man macros.
You're right, we have too large a legacy problem there to move to 
a purely semantic markup.  I am less bothered by this than I might be 
because doclifter exists and works.

What we can do, though, is look for ways to (a) reduce the inventory of
low-level troff requests a man-page renderer has to support, and (b)
further enrich the semantic content so that renderers can do a better
job without having to ve as complex as doclifter.

No, I don't have anything specific in mind for (b) yet. 
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>



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