David Manura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think what is missing in perlpodtut is a high-level summary or clear > statement of what POD is intended for and what it's scope and > limitations are. There are multipurpose formatting languages like HTML, > which can be used even for web application GUIs. PDF is for precise > page layouts. Things like Doxygen/Javadoc are mainly for API > documentation. Graphical formatting languages might render logical > models of the software (e.g. UML). Things like XML are relatively > verbose and not always ideal for humans to write in a text editor but > rather using a graphical tool. I believe POD is for -documenting > plainly- either inside or outside of Perl source code files and by > humans
The key words that come to my mind in thinking about POD are "simple," "easy to learn," and "minimal" (the latter in the sense that POD documents mostly look like plain text. POD is becoming rather widely used as a much easier way of generating man pages than writing nroff even with projects that have nothing at all to do with Perl. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
