Re: RFC 357 (v1) Perl should use XML for documentation instead of POD

[Damien Neil]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 03:15:22AM -0600, Tom Christiansen wrote:
> >POD, presumably.  Or maybe son-of-POD; it would be nice to have better
> >support for tables and lists.
> 
> We did this for the camel.   Which, I remind the world, was 
> written in pod.

What kinds of things got added for the camel?

Personally, my largest complaint with POD is that lists eat far too
much vertical whitespace.  It takes four lines to write a one line
checklist item.

SDF does lists in a simple fashion that is both easy to read and write:

* Item one of a bulleted list.
* Item two.
* Item three.

. Item one of a numbered list.
^ Item two.
. Start of a new numbered list.

This breaks POD's use of blank lines as paragraph separators, however.

Perhaps POD could get a =list directive?  (=over is evil, IMO.  You
shouldn't be specifying the number of columns to indent ("=over 4"),
you should be specifying logical indentation depth.)

=list
* Item.
* Item.
* Item.

=endlist

                       - Damien