On 2023-09-24 15:47, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
On 9/24/23 14:37, Dennis German wrote:
After the years and fine tuning of basic HTML, why aren't the man
pages
standardized to HTML format?
Perhaps some users don't frequently enough reference man pages as they
should and fewer use info , but (nearly) everyone uses a browser.
Sorry, I don't get the point.
HTML might be nice to read, but it's cumbersome to write.
Authors do not want to care about formatting too much.
Therefore, the documentation - both the man pages and the Texinfo
manual -
is maintained in formats which are easy to write and track.
Good point. Another popular format, markdown, just confirms that the
ease of writing is very important, together with the ability to view the
source as-is, with no rendering applied, and to still be able to read
it.
Besides viewing them with their principal reader (man, info, pinfo,
..),
those formats allow the conversion to several other nice formats ...
among them HTML.
The Texinfo manual is rendered into various formats: HTML, PDF, DVI,
ASCII.
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/
And also the man pages are available online in HTML format:
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/
... and on many other web sites.
Have a nice day,
Berny
