Dragan Simic <dsi...@manjaro.org> writes: > On 2023-09-24 15:47, Bernhard Voelker wrote: >> On 9/24/23 14:37, Dennis German wrote: >>> After the years and fine tuning of basic HTML, why aren't the man pages >>> standardized to HTML format? >>> Perhaps some users don't frequently enough reference man pages as they >>> should and fewer use info , but (nearly) everyone uses a browser. >> Sorry, I don't get the point. >> HTML might be nice to read, but it's cumbersome to write. >> Authors do not want to care about formatting too much. >> Therefore, the documentation - both the man pages and the Texinfo manual - >> is maintained in formats which are easy to write and track. > > Good point. Another popular format, markdown, just confirms that the ease of > writing is very important, together with the ability to view the source as-is, > with no rendering applied, and to still be able to read it.
Sadly, Markdown takes the opposite extreme, where it lacks basic features like indexing or cross-references, or footnotes, ... Things like reST and AsciiDoc do better in that regard. >> Besides viewing them with their principal reader (man, info, pinfo, ..), >> those formats allow the conversion to several other nice formats ... >> among them HTML. >> The Texinfo manual is rendered into various formats: HTML, PDF, DVI, ASCII. >> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/ >> And also the man pages are available online in HTML format: >> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/ > > ... and on many other web sites. > >> Have a nice day, >> Berny -- Arsen Arsenović
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