Ricardo Signes <[email protected]> writes: > The long-lost question of "Why can't we have L<text|href>?" came up this > week on p5p. David Wheeler and I spoke about the issue briefly, because > we couldn't find anything in perlpod or perlpodspec that really > specifically addressed the reason other than "because it would be > difficult."
> I did a fair big of archive-diving and found two basic arguments: > (1) Sean Burke was fighting against very painful parsing code and wanted to > keep things as simple as possible, which was "not very simple" to begin > with. Adding this seemed too hard, and it was declared off limits. > (2) It was unclear how non-hypertext formatters would choose to render links > with text. > As to (2), I think it's up to the formatter, many of them already deal > with this problem, and I do not think any formatter author will be > terribly inconvenienced by it. > As for (1), I think that it is actually not difficult, and merely > appeared so due to the software involved at the time. David and I > whipped up what I believe is a fairly complete and mostly unambiguous > grammar: I was in favor of this originally and am still in favor of it now. I think we should support it and am happy to find a way of representing the results textually in Pod::Text and Pod::Man. It will produce much nicer HTML output. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
