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Maybe we need to nail the problem (Score:2)

by Elian (119)

One of the things I notice when most people start going on about changing POD to do umpteen zillion things is they start off by profoundly missing the point. POD is a low-pain way of writing simple docs, low-pain enough so it's generally even less hassle than writing the code you're documenting. POD really doesn't do footnotes, or endnotes, or tables of contents, or hyperlinked documentation (yeah, I know, L does, but it's broken by design), or...

It is deficient in some ways. L is just wrong. We could use
- Re:Maybe we need to nail the problem (Score:1)
  
  by Matts (1087) on 2001.12.16 12:04 (#2345) Journal
  
  Yeah, I think we're in total agreement...
  
  The way I see addressing the problem is to create a POD API (not sure if POM is the right thing - I think we'd miss a streaming API) such that we could rip out POD and replace it with XML, when we needed that sort of power (or choose markup language X). It would have to cope with some sort of extensibility mechanism like XML Namespaces, so that we could define metadata tags (I use tags in the loosest sense of the word - they could be POD formatting constructs) in a consistent manner.
  
  Anyway, I have way too many other things to be working on, so I'll get back to being an implementation type, rather than an ideas type :-)
  
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