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

[James K. Lowden]

On Sat, 21 Apr 2018 12:59:16 -0500
Nate Bargmann <address@hidden> wrote:

> But why do we focus on presentation when authoring a document?  

Because the document we see is what we're creating.  The only purpose
of the document is to be read, and appearance matters to the reader.
The reader assuredly doesn't care about semantic markup.  

Semantic markup is an abstraction that assists the author.  It can
ensure that semantically similar things -- section headers, quotations,
etc. -- are rendered consistently.  It can help -- somewhat -- in
rendering the same input text pleasantly in different output formats.
It can help indexing programs and such knit together different
documents in ways that are useful to the user (and thus to the
author).  

There's no Higher Good honored by using semantic markup.  It's a tool
to use if it gets you where you want to go.  Ultimately, though, you
want your text to be read, and it is altogether fitting and proper that
you be concerned with its appearance.  

--jkl