On 10/3/00 10:59 AM, John Porter wrote:
> John Siracusa wrote:
>> POD is supposed to be the common format that can be transformed into other
>> representations. Instead, you have to add the different representations
>> yourself if you do anything remotely complex.
>
> No, POD is supposed to be simple.
Well yeah, that too.
> If you add (e.g.) support for tables, then pod is only translatable
> into languages which also support tables.
What languages *don't* support tables? ASCII sure does. Let the
translators worry about how, exactly, to down-convert to simpler formats.
Let *them* do the special-cases.
Again, this doesn't mean POD has to be massively complex or use "heavy"
markup like XML or anything silly like that. Heck, define POD tables any
way you want, just make sure there *is* a standard way to make POD tables.
Then let pod2html convert them to HTML tables and pod2text convert them to
ASCII art tables, etc. etc.
>> People are looking for POD alternatives because doing complex things in POD
>> is so hard and/or annoying.
>
> Complex things should not be done in POD.
I contend that good documentation *is* a complex thing...well, more complex
than the set of things that can be done in "standard" POD, anyway.
> only a SIMPLE format can be translated into "anything".
See above.
>> So people stick to Plain Old POD, sans fancy =for business, 90% of the time.
>
> Yes - as it was meant to be.
I disagree. That's *too* "plain" and "old", IMO.
-John
