On 10/3/00 12:01 PM, John Porter wrote:
> John Siracusa wrote:
>>> If you add (e.g.) support for tables, then pod is only translatable
>>> into languages which also support tables.
>>
>> What languages *don't* support tables?
>
> I knew that was a bad example of my point. Think of something complex.
> O.k., how about mathematical formulas. Doable in XHTML and LaTeX, NOT
> doable in HTML 3.2. Not really doable in ASCII, either.
Who said anything about equations? (Well, I didn't anyway :) Is that
useful in most documentation? Maybe for stats packages, but something like
tables is useful in a heck of a lot more common documentation situations.
There are certainly things that are either too complex or too specialized to
belong in POD, but there are plenty of things that are very useful but that
currently have to be hacked in via duplicating a bunch of =for sections
and hoping for the best.
Tables are my personal peeve, but I'm sure you can think of many more common
documentation features that POD should support natively. Hypertext is
another example, off the top of my head. The current support requires too
much guessing on the part of the pod2* translators and provides too little
control for the author, IMO.
-John
