On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 02:37:59PM -0600, Sean M. Burke wrote:
> At 02:13 PM 2001-04-20 -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote:
>
> Now, your suggestion:
>
> >L<link> A link (cross reference) to "link"
> > "link" follows these rules:
> > name(#) A manual Page (# is optional)
> > /"sec" A section (" optional)
> > :"ident" An item (" optional)
> > "text"| An arbitrary text string to print (" optional)
> >[...] L<"text"|name(#)/"sec":"ident">
>
> is rather more ambitious than mine, and is yet a third way to impute the
> semantics of section-link-destination versus item-link-destination: it
> apparently envisages a distinction between the two, such that they are no
> longer mutually exclusive!
> (At least as I understand things, they /are/ mutually exclusive currently:
> a link is either to L<name/item> or L<name/"section">.)
>
> So does L<name/"sec":"foos"> mean a link to the link-tag in the "sec"
> section, ignoring any other "foos" things in the document? I don't think
> those semantics are feasable in HTML, and I think of hypertextification as
> basically the whole point of the L<...> construct (since otherwise you
> could just have plaintext saying: "See Foo::Bar's section on Baz"). And
> making a hypertext construct that's hard to make into HTML is very bad idea.
Sure it's feasible; you just have to set up the A NAME anchors
appropriately.
<A NAME="sec1">
<A NAME="sec1-foos">
<A NAME="sec2">
<A NAME="sec2-foos">
> Also, if I read it right, your proposal is incompatible with existing POD;
> it would reject like L<perlvar/Predefined Names> and L<perlvar/$^F>. And,
> for incompatibility in the other direction, I think that current POD
> parsers would misread L<foo|"name":"section"> as making the text foo a link
> to a man page called name":"section [sic!].
Ugh. L<> is broken. Personally, I'd like to see it fixed, even if it
breaks compatibility with existing POD. Perhaps with a converter from old
L<> style to new L<> style.
> But I like compatibility; and my suggestion is basically a clarification of
> existing practice (i.e., clarifying that section-link-targets and
> item-link-targes might as well be the same thing), and my further
> suggestion for deprecation (above) is just to shoo people away from
> pointlessly ambiguous constructs.
It is an improvement, but I think it's worth considering going further and
fixing L<> completely.
Ronald
