On 2023-09-24 05:37, Dennis German wrote: > After the years and fine tuning of basic HTML, why > aren't the man pages standardized to HTML format?
The official documentation for GNU Coreutils is the texinfo pages, not man pages. Info renders to HTML. The HTML doc for GNU Coreutils is hosted here: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/ It has internal hyperlink and makes use of fonts and all. It's built from the same documentation source files as what you see when you run the terminal-based info program. (HTML can be obtained from man pages, but it's a hacky process. There are multiple converters that suck in different ways.) Writing documentation natively in HTML, rather than through a markup language which generates HTML, is suboptimal. It will result in something that cannot be easily shown in plain text. There are text-only browsers, but they don't render things as nicely as a dedicated mark-up format designed with plain text support. People actually working with utilities like to look at documentation in the same environment, often in the same terminal session.
