Mark-Jason Dominus pointed out to me a passing idea of Ilya Zakharevich's, in a previous p5p discussion, which I now think highly of: http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2000-05/msg00104.html
The basic idea is to allow specifying expansions to Pod, but specifying how they should degrade for renderers that don't know about them. I'll rephrase the idea here, pared down, and with a tentative stab at a different syntax: =equate N C This means "In [the remainder of] this document, I may use a formatting code N<foo bar>. And if you don't know what an N<foo bar> is, pretend I used a C<foo bar> instead." =equate N - This means "...and if you don't know what a N<foo bar> means, ignore it and all its content." =equate N + This means "...and if you don't know what a N<foo bar> means, pretend I used foo bar (with no surrounding sequence) instead." Not sure whether to allow something like: =equate N C,I "...and if you don't know what an N<foo bar> is, pretend I used a C<I<foo bar>> instead." I can imagine applying this-all to directives too, but I have the intuition that that might be stretching the concept too far. -- Sean M. Burke [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
