On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:
> > > > I hope that you write the doc is POD :)
> > >
> > > I suppose I could... I was planning on having a nice checklist of
> > > features/systems that would be a pain to do in a fixed width font. An
> > > HTML table would make my life MUCH easier there. Is there something in
> > > POD that makes tables easier?
> >
> > Write the text in POD, and put the checklist data in with some neutral
> > format. Then we can use a customized pod2html converter on it to generate
> > a pretty table. XML would be a nice way to store the raw data. This
> > might end up being kind of big for an in-line, so we could do something
> > like "=table data_file.xml" and keep it in a separate file. (Or is it
> > better to use "=for html" and put the rest inside that, so that it still
> > passes syntax checks for standard POD?)
>
> I believe XML is a way too heavy for docs writing. Why one will want to
> get a messy source code, when you can get away with a minimalistic POD.
> Just look at the Guide's source code and look at the generated PDF --
> isn't it great? I love POD. And if you want more than POD provides, it
> takes secs to add the new functionality.
People are migrating to XML because there are good editors coming onto the
market (though sadly none for Linux yet, but I'm getting close to
persuading Arbotext to port Adept to Linux...). The editors hide the
complexity and you never need to see the source code. But its there if you
need it (unlike Word, for example).
> As for POD, I've already extended the POD in POD2HTML (which was buggy
> anyway). For example, I've added new directives for embedding images,
> linking to files and more... I don't afraid to extend the POD since I can
> easily convert all my extended pod files back into the standard POD
> format. So if you want a syntax for tables, this should be easy to add,
> like:
>
> =table args
>
> =tr args
>
> =td args
>
> ...
>
> =/td
>
> =/tr
>
> =/table
Ugh... I believe SDF has better support for tables, without resorting to
nastiness like that. I think if you like POD, you'll love SDF, Stas.
http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf/
--
<Matt/>
Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
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