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<node id="490864" title="Please for the love of god, can I get a documentation format that doesn't suck?" created="2005-09-10 06:15:17" updated="2005-09-10 02:15:17">
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perlmeditation</type>
<author id="154315">
BUU</author>
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Let me preface this by saying I realize it isn't really the best place to be saying this. I'm posting here more as an exercise of letting off steam than any expectation of real change.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;

Recently I was playing around with doing some automatic generation of various pieces of information from the copious documentation that comes with perl. For example, one of things I was playing with was attempting to make &lt;code&gt;perldoc -X $var&lt;/code&gt; work in the same way that &lt;code&gt;perldoc -f func&lt;/code&gt; works. It sounded simple and fairly easy to do. So I opened up perlvar.pod. Good lord, do they ever use the same convention twice? Head 1 tags there, head 2 tags here, random lists, etc. It was really not very nice to parse.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
I realize at the time they came up with pod, they wanted a simple language anyone could use that would produce nicely formatted documentation. In that respect, it reminds me a lot of say,  HTML2. Quick and simple, combining content and presentation. Well HTML has moved on, can POD move on also?&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
I hate to jump on the XML bandwagon and pointlessly use it, but it does seem like the best way for documentation to be self documenting, as it were. I suppose we could also solve this by just mandating a specific POD layout, or perhaps a version of POD with a higher emphasis on the metadata instead of the presentation.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
Regardless of how we do it, can we please god get it done?!
&lt;p&gt;&lt;small&gt;20050913 Unconsidered by [Corion]. Was at "keep: 19 edit: 19 delete: 0" by [monsieur_champs]: "Please adjust title to something more aligned with your text, Its an interesting and needed proposal." &lt;/small&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</field>
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