Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?

[James K. Lowden]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2018 01:44:06 +1000
John Gardner <address@hidden> wrote:

> > You might like to believe that eqn, tbl, and pic could be processed
> > with grohtml
> 
> I've seen grohtml's complexity and was bewildered.  Hence why I
> intend to write my own. The procedures for inferring structural or
> semantic metadata from low-level intermediate output commands will be
> an entertaining challenge. =)

For lack of a better term, I think it's an abstraction mismatch.  The
ditroff language presupposes a dot-addressable canvas, onto which lines
and strings of text are drawn.  That model fits most printers (these
days) and terminals.  But it doesn't describe HTML at all.  

I discussed HTML output with Ted Faber, of grap, upon a time.  He
produces HTML from a handful of his own macros.  ISTM ms macros map
onto HTML pretty well:

        .SH     => <h1>
        .PP     => <p>
        .I      => <i>
        .B      => <b>

and so on.  But what, for example, is HTML to do with line
justification, and why should the browser honor the (implied) line
breaks, when it has its own line-wrapping logic and style sheet, and
the page size is dynamic?

Similarly, it's fairly easy, up to a point, to imagine tbl generating
HTML tables directly, easier (for me, anyway) than imagining how to
infer the table structure after it's passed through groff.  But then
there are little niggles like <a href> and HTML's table/cell borders.  

<rant>
I've said before that it's a terrible, terrible shame HTML ever was
invented.  It didn't need to be, and the cost is surely measured in
billions of man-hours.  When it was invented, the roff language was
already 10 years old and in widespread use.  It could have been adapted
to the www through the simple expediency of writing a ditroff interface
to the browser, such that the browser accepted and rendered ditroff
output, as a postprocessor.  The few novel aspects of that HTML
introduced (relative to roff) -- hypherlinks, POST -- could have been
added to roff.  The escape mechanism was already there.  And, voila!
The thousands of roff documents already extant would have been
instantantly accessible, and the skill of using the language extended
to a new realm.  We wouldn't be talking about how to
convert/adapt/generate, because there'd be only one language.  

Yeah, I inow the history.  Yet, even now, there's no low-level
dot-addressable interface to the browser.  It has to *interpret*
everything: SVG, PNG, you name it.   Why use anything if you can
reinvent it?
.rant off

--jkl