2000-12-05-13:02:56 Nathan Torkington:
> I say that the person who *does* the work deserves the right to
> choose what format it is in. So long as we can make navigable
> webpages out of it, that person can write on a Commodore 64 for
> all I care.
Would you accept a restatement of: as long as whatever it is can be
translated into a common format, we can work with it, and the
composition of the actual words is far more important than niggling
over choices in preferred markup style?
My own personal favourite for archival format would be to stick
with POD until and unless we can cons up something even Plainer
than POD. I've got this dream that someday we'll be able to take
something --- perhaps based on Damian's Text::Autoformat --- and
use it to parse purely plain ASCII text, formatted nicely for
screen display, with no markup at all, and garnish it with markup
allowing it to be automatically translated into nice sexy HTML, or
SGML according to various other DTDs, or XML, or POD, or the man
or mandoc troff macros, or LaTeX, or whatever. But it remains a
dream, a fantasy, and I'd say until it's executed, POD rules for a
redistributable format; and if folks want to contribute substantial
piles of useful docs in other formats, we can convert 'em into POD.
-Bennett
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