Thanks Sean, I will take a look at Pod::Simple::HTML soon, as a replacement for the code currently being used on search.cpan.org.
Graham. On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 02:29:54AM -0600, Sean M. Burke wrote: > By popular request, I have released an underdocumented beta of my new Pod > parser framework. It's called Pod::Simple, and it's entering CPAN as > Pod-Simple-0.90.tar.gz right now. > If your nearest CPAN mirror doesn't have it yet, you can get it right from > here: > http://members.spinn.net/~sburke/Pod-Simple-0.90.tar.gz > > I'm sure people have many questions that would have been answered in the > documentation, if it were complete. Feel free to ask me! You can ask on > the list, since I'm sure if you have a question, then others probably have > the same question. Also, interested developers should look at the .t > files, which contain hundreds of examples of Pod input and the XML output > that it should produce. > > > I suppose I should say a few words of introduction to Pod::Simple. So here > goes: > > Pod is meant to be easy to write, but it's not easy to parse. However, > Pod::Simple handles all the syntactic vagarities of Pod, and basically it > gives you (as a programmer who wants to process Pod) some interface thru > which you can mostly pretend that Pod is just like XML -- namely, that tags > are nested properly, that elements often carry useful data as attributes in > their start-tags, and so on. Even the style of the interfaces should be > very familiar to programmers used to munging XML. > > As I have said before, I want Pod::Simple (once it is more tested and is > completely documented) to replace Pod::Parser, which I want to > deprecate. I want all the important formatters (and processors) to change > from using Pod::Parser to using Pod::Simple. I hope this should be > straightforward and actually /pleasant/, and I will help out wherever possible. > The current Pod::Simple dist even contains some rudimentary modules for > turning Pod into plaintext or HTML. The HTML module (Pod::Simple::HTML) is > not finished yet; but I intend it to replace the current (appalling) > Pod::Html soon. Formatter authors may want to look at the source to > Pod::Simple::HTML and Pod::Simple::Text. > > My goals for Pod::Simple have been to make it comply to perlpodspec, to > make it do as much work as possible for the programmer who's writing a Pod > processor, and to make it as robust and forgiving as possible (i.e., to > DWIM) in treating malformed Pod input. > > Pod may be a "simple" markup language, but there's no reason why it > shouldn't have good, solid, modern parser interfaces. The mere facts that > some older Pod parsers were bad and that some of the older documentation > for the Pod format was sketchy, don't make Pod a bad language. It just > means that people want it to Do What I Mean, and are frustrated when it > doesn't. I have tried to make things all better now. > > > The code inside Pod::Simple is some of the hardest I've ever written in my > life. It feels like I ended up pulling out every mind-bending trick I used > in HTML::TreeBuilder and then some. Hopefully the resulting code is still > quite readable, without revealing how hard it was to come up with. And > much more importantly, I hope I have gotten the API to totally hide the > complexity of the underlying code. Moreover, the code seems to be passably > fast on typical cases. Even on perltoc.pod (a case of almost pathological > complexity and length) it is quite well-behaved. > > In writing Pod::Simple, I have thought mostly of the tasks of writing Pod > formatters. I would like to hear from the authors of other sorts of Pod > processors (i.e., authors of Pod utilities) to hear if they see ways I can > make the Pod::Simple modules easier for them to use -- in thinking more > about formatting than general processing tasks, I may have overlooked > useful features. > > Now, everyone, Try It And See. > > -- > Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/ >
