perlmeditation
BUU
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.<br><br>
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 <code>perldoc -X $var</code> work in the same way that <code>perldoc -f func</code> 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.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Regardless of how we do it, can we please god get it done?!
<p><small>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." </small></p>