Schwern wrote:
>
>Dangermouse
>
>We watched Dangermouse, The Avenging Disco Godfather and probably too
>much Monty Python for our own good. Put yo' WEIGHT on it!
I can see how Danger Mouse might be considered quality, but Avenging
Disco Godfather? No way.
>Adam Turoff gave a talk about stealing ideas from LaTeX, XML and SGML
>and incorporating them into POD. I missed it. Anyone go?
No, but it's in the proceedings, and I'm kind of familiar with the
topic, so I'll attempt a brief rundown in my own words:
1. These days it's fashionable for markup languages to describe the
content, not the presentation. This helps computers parse them better.
For instance, <italic>Je ne sais quois</italic> is less recognisable as
a phrase in a foreign language than <foreign-phrase lang="fr">Je ne sais
quoi</foreign-phrase>
2. POD, as it currently stands, is almost entirely presentation-based.
For instance, =head1 produces a level one heading but doesn't actually
say much about the structure of the document; B<> says something's bold
but doesn't say why.
3. Adam's proposal is that semantic tags would be useful in POD,
primarily for converting between POD and other semantic markup languages
such as Docbook. He has invented some new POD-like tags for this:
=chapter
=section
=appendix
=title
=fpara (a formal paragraph, i.e. a para with a title)
=list
=code
em<>
function<>
literal<>
4. This would then make it easy to convert to/from Docbook, another very
common/popular documentation markup language. This means that you don't
have to know all of Docbook to write Docbook -- you can write in this
cut-down, intermediate level: DocPOD
5. There are some modules for doing the translation etc, see DocPod::*,
presumably on CPAN.
HTH,
K.
--
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://infotrope.net/
"Be pedantic in what you accept, and arbitrarily brutal in what you
send." -- Malcolm Ray in a.s.r
