At 02:13 PM 2001-04-20 -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote:
>"Sean M. Burke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>| L<name> manual page
>| L<name/"sec"> section or item in other manual page
>| (the quotes are optional)
>| L</"sec"> section or item in this manual page
>| (the quotes are optional)
>| L<"sec"> section or item in this manual page
>| (the quotes are recommended; sec
>| also cannot contain a '|')
>
>So how do you differential between L<name> and L<sec> if the quotes are
>only recommended?
You can't, and that's a well-known problem. It's a problem separate from
what my post was actually about, but that didn't stop me from proposing a
solution a few lines down from what you quoted:
L<"sec"> and L<sec> (deprecated: use L</"sec">)
and
L<text|"sec">
and L<text|sec> (deprecated: use L<text|/"sec">)
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.
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!].
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.
--
Sean M. Burke [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
