On 6/21/07, brian d foy wrote:
Couldn't most of this be figured out by making Pod6 extensible (or whatever the right term is). Pod6 would be more of the syntax and basic operation, but other people could have custom directives that their Pod6 translators and formatters could then use.
Yeah, then you could write in Kwid/HTML/etc. or C<use> custom parsers or whatever.... I bet Damian wishes he'd thought of that! =) Seriously, I think POD is as extensible as it's supposed to be, and I like what Damian has done. I also share MarkOv's sentiments, but I think there's less opposition here than it may seem because there are really two (almost) separate issues here. (Of course, if human nature didn't tend to polarise every discussion, how would we have fun??)
That is, if we want something different than you want we have to have competing specs and there won't be any compromise?
I think he's saying we actually need some competing specs if there is to be anything to compromise on. I also think that if we did start spec'ing out what many people (including me) are looking for, we'd find that we're adding something else rather than compromising on anything.
Part of the issue is that "POD" seems to be two things: there's POD the markup format, analogous to Kwid or RTF, which when given a chunk of text applies certain meanings to sequences like "B<>", etc. Then there's POD the (dis)integration standard that consists of rules ("=" in the first column!) to distinguish POD-markup from non-markup (source code or anything else).
I want to be able to have documentation that "belongs" to Perl objects (probably something like an "is documented" trait), so I can say things like "perldoc Some::Module --sub=foo --param=size" and get back a piece of text specifically applying to that one parameter. The piece of text could consist of POD-markup (or Kwid or HTML), but it couldn't use POD-integration because there's no way to "attach" a section of POD to a specific piece of Perl syntax. (Unless I'm missing something, which is always possible; you can put a piece of POD geographically next to a Perl declaration, but I'm not sure that's unambiguous enough. Hm, why not? POD doesn't know what's going on around it, but Perl does, and could say, "I've just declared $size, and the next line starts a chunk of POD, so I'll simply copy it into $size's 'documented' trait... would that work??)
-David
