On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:14:47 -0400 Larry Kollar <larry.kol...@me.com> wrote:
> Complain about Markdown all you will, and use weird-arse corner cases > to show it?s Bad, but GFM can handle a lot of everyday text. If you limit the feature set to what markdown does, -ms macros are readable too. It's a little tricky to set up an auto-incrementing register -- I always have to look it up -- and it's a nuisance to separate paragraphs with PP, but SH, IP, I, B, and PP get a lot done. Obviously -ms lacks hyperlinks. The things markdown lacks are too numerous to mention. > OK, let?s move to *roff for a moment. It can do most of the things > that DITA advocates tout: reusable topics, conditionals, variables, > insertions, and so forth (you can get a *lot* of mileage out of .so). > Most of the -ms macros that come before the first .LP or .NH are > considered book metadata in DITA, so metadata is covered. What > *roff doesn?t do is produce usable HTML output. Yet. There can be no question that troff boasts a very rich input language. Every time I point that out in the context of advocating its use, someone says, "but HTML". I think the idea behind grothml is that one input document "just works" with any backend. A different -- and, I would argue, more realistic -- approach would be a macro-to-HTML converter that worked only for documents expressly written with HTML in mind, using only macros and eschewing troff requests. Such a document is, I assert, easily converted to HTML and produces perfectly acceptable PDF. Almost any macro set you pick maps onto HTML pretty well because they work at about the same level: they define gross aspects of the document that are refined in terms of the target device. If there was a simple way to add a "class" and "id" to macros (that would be ignored except for HTML) then a very simple HTML tagged with classes and IDs could leave most presentation choices to CSS. Any suggestions on how -ms macros could be compatibly extended to include classes and IDs? I've always found that aspect of my "proposal" daunting. --jkl
