Ok, wow, didn't think I'd generate this much feedback. First of all, let me say that yes, I agree, the perldoc name for the sourceforge project is bad--I was going to change it.
Second, I was originally thinking about this for Perl 5. However, after reading some of the Perl 6 RFC's I would want to aim it at Perl 6, because there is still room for suggestion in some of the internals. Third, I also agree that POD is pretty cool. However, here are a few things (taken from various sources, and one of my own) that I think POD is a *little* lacking in. I agree with the first three items right out of http://dev.perl.org/rfc/5.pod 1. IT'S NOT INTUITIVE 2. IT'S NOT DOCUMENTATION BTW, I don't think the Perl 6 RFC 357 (XML for Documentation) Is the way to go either, that would add too much extra text in the documentation. 3. IT DOESN'T ENCOURAGE CONSISTENCY 3a. I have seen consistency with quite a few POD documents like: =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Michael J. Mathews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 14 Aug 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 5 Version: 3 But my question is, is that a standard way to write the VERSION header, is the VERSION header even standard? 4. IT'S NOT STRICTLY STRUCTURED A lot of the Perl POD documents, like -http://perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perlpod.html are very useful, but there is no 'standard'. Take the VERSION head for example, if it were required for every POD document, and Maintainer||Author and Date were required, it would be much easier to read, because they would all have to be formatted that way. Although, Date and Number, and maybe a few others would exist, but be optional (yet, they would have to be predefined, and if they weren't on the list of 'options' for the VERSION head, then a standard POD reader wouldn't recognize them. 5. Currently, the POD directives require too much whitespace (newlines too). For example, for POD to look write you have to write it as: =head1 TITLE Simple Program works nicely, and does: =head1 TITLE Simple Program However, this doesn't: =head1 TITLE Simple Program =head1 VERSION Being addressed by http://dev.perl.org/rfc/216.html My goal was attempting to emulate Javadoc in Perl, where some pod2html documents would reference each other and everything, but POD already does some of that. I would just like to see POD become a little more strict. And, after that post from Randal, I think I'll shut up. _nick
