At 04:47 PM 2001-04-20 -0400, Ronald J Kimball wrote:
>[...discussing a proposed new syntax for L<...>]
>> 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.
>
>Sure it's feasible; you just have to set up the A NAME anchors
>appropriately.
>
><A NAME="sec1">
><A NAME="sec1-foos">
><A NAME="sec2">
><A NAME="sec2-foos">
So if the HTML anchorname for something is made from its section name, a
'-', and its item name, that means that you can't easily HTMLify a
Potter-syntax link like L<text|Foo:baz> (where there's an item but no
section) -- because you'd need to actually look at the document Foo (in its
HTML output, which might not exist yet? in its POD original?), and see
what section contains a 'baz' item, so that you can know what to use for
'somesection' in <A HREF="/path/to/Foo/somesection-baz">.
That's what I mean saying that Stephen Potter's suggestion (such as I
understood it) made HTMLification hard, all for the sake of some extra
semantics that we've gotten this far without (and that I for one never
missed).
Making HTMLification /easy/ would be if one could translate
L<text|Foo/stuff> without having to inspect the document Foo. If one
accepts that there is a section-target/item-target distinction and that
they are mutually exclusive (i.e., they're two different namespaces for
target-names in a document), then a pod2html could turn L<Foo/"whatever">
into href="/path/to/Foo#s_whatever" and L<Foo/whatever> into
href="/path/to/Foo#i_whatever", with those s_ and i_ prefixes to keep the
namespaces separate.
Conversely, if one accepts my proposal that there is no section-target /
item-target distinction, then they both happily fold into
href="/path/to/Foo#whatever".
In neither of THOSE cases (of non-Potter syntax) does HTMLification mean
having to look at the target document.
>> Also, if I read it right, your proposal is incompatible with existing POD;
>>[...]
>Ugh. L<> is broken. Personally, I'd like to see it fixed, even if it
>breaks compatibility with existing POD. Perhaps with a converter from old
>L<> style to new L<> style.
Parts of L<...> are pointlessly ambiguous, and if we get people to avoid
those (by deprecating in perlpod as I suggested; and by making podchecker
scream), and then clarify this section-target/item-target distinction, or
lack thereof, then it's FIXED. Tra la! Then we can turn on the fountains,
bring out the giant peaches, and declare it a reflowering of happytime on
Earth.
Moreover: if one /were/ to change link syntax to something incompatible,
one might as well just use a new sequence, say, H<...> (h for hypertext).
At least there you can /tell/ the old from the new (L<...> from H<...>),
which is a minimal requirement on any sane data format.
However, I don't think a new sequence is warranted.
--
Sean M. Burke [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
