"David E. Wheeler" <[email protected]> writes: > I just wrote tests for the text output from Pod::Simple::Text. It's like > this:
> POD | Text Output > --------------------------------+------------------ > L<things|crontab(5)> | things > L<things|crontab(5)/foo> | things > L<Perl Error Messages|perldiag> | Perl Error Message > L<perl.org|http://perl.org> | perl.org > I think it most unfortunate that the URL is lost in text output. I see > two ways around this: I think this output is correct for everything except the last form. There's a long tradition of the text before the vertical bar being what should be displayed in a text document for Pod::Text and Pod::Man for those places where it was already supported, and I don't think we want to break that. Existing documents expect that behavior. For the latter, I think the best rendering for both Pod::Text and Pod::Man is: perl.org <http://perl.org> and that's what I plan to implement. That's a fairly natural expression of a URL in a text document and follows the IETF recommendation. > 1. Change it to output with the URL using something like Markdown format: > POD | Text Output > --------------------------------+-------------------------------- > L<things|crontab(5)> | [things](crontab(5)) > L<things|crontab(5)/foo> | [things](crontab(5)/foo) > L<Perl Error Messages|perldiag> | [.Perl Error Message](perldiag) > L<perl.org|http://perl.org> | [perl.org](http://perl.org) This isn't a very natural written English way of expressing a link. I think producing Markdown output is a great idea, but Markdown is another formatting language. It's not plain text and shouldn't be the output of a translator to text. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
