Manual pages

Yeeks. It seems that I have started a religous war. For what it's
worth, I know a fair bit about all the systems mentioned. DOing man
pages in HTML is out for 2 reasons:

  1) There are no good TTY HTML browsers available (lynx is not
     "good")
  2) HTML is not good SGML. HTML is kind of like a readable ROFF
     in that it specifies formattting over structure.

My experiences with both techinfo have been good. The only major
gripes I have with it are about navigation, and the info browser UI.
If all the man pages were justsingle pages, I think we might be able
to get a reasonable output, and reasonable speed. I also have a man
page to texinfo converter (rough but workable on a lot of man pages).

The other alternative is to define an SGML DTD for man pages for VSTa,
and use that. The result would be something like an easily parsable
LaTeX. Something that could be formatted on the fly easily, or used to
produce printed pages if needed.

Thoughts?

 
Received on Tue May 10 08:58:45 1994