[SLUG] Re: Miguels Unix Sucks paper and sluggers thoughts.

[Angus Lees <gusl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2000 at 12:37:21PM +0800, tenzero@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > i agree completely, and believe that the existing man page system is
> > perfect for the task.
> > now you just have to tell all those "we must have all documentation as
> > HTML, because thats good (for some reason)" gnome people that ;)
> > (i think kde is also in that camp?)
> 
> Thanks for the support earlier.  This HTML business isn't likely to
> go away, it is very likely to become the defacto txt document
> replacement. It is very portable / platform independent and somewhat
> easier to navigate for newbies.  I can't imagine it would take that
> great an effort to migrate man pages to

(s/info/man/ an earlier post)

"tkman" offers a very nice hyperlinked manpage viewer. much easier to
use than a web page, since *every* bit of text is a potential
hyperlink, something that would look very wierd in most browsers.

> HTML anyway. It could prolly be done as a separate module that simply
> formats the man page on the fly.

man2html do ?

even vanilla man(1) can do standalone html formatting (ie. everything
but inter-manpage links):  "man -Thtml man"

> > (or if they must use SGML, they can use docbook <refentry> sections,
> > which deliberately duplicate manpage structure)
> 
> If there is a mechanism to do that then great. Wouldn't want to be
> reinventing the wheel after all this advocacy for not doing so....

unfortunately html has become a layout language, rather than a markup
for structured documents (of course, troff was always "just a
typesetting language" - its just that manpages now have fairly strict
conventions)

-- 
 - Gus