Dear all, let me summarize a few statements and comment: * There is a need to markup URLs in POD * The naming style of URLs is not negotiable by the one who links *to* that URL; URLs can be rather long; therefore it is desirable to specify the link text. * The syntax of L<...> - good or bad as it is today - is used in innumerable POD documents all across the net * The parsers of POD have to deal with that L<...> syntax anyway (L<text|...>) * Introducing U<...> means changing the parsers and the converters; using L<...> needs perhaps some adaptations, but no fundamental change
Therefore I propose to * Document in perlpodspec that L<scheme:...> and L<text|scheme:...> are both legal; if "text" contains "|", these need to be escaped as E<verbar>, the URL may contain "|" unescaped(?). * Adapt the parsers accordingly. Pod::Compiler does it today and Pod::POM - as far as I understand from the code - could do it easily. * Text-only converters can spit out "text (scheme:...)" for L<text|scheme:...> or the like in order to not lose information. * Avoid the overhead to introduce a new U<...> markup. What do you think? Cheers, Marek
