Re: man pages & info prefer HTML format

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 9/25/23 01:25, Dennis German wrote:
> I'd like to understand why you feel that
> " ability to view the source as-is, with no rendering applied"
> is important

Because that is how software development is done.  It's all about
changes to some kind of text, be it either program source code or
documentation.  Both is tracked via version control, and for each
desired change ... well the diff of that change is reviewed.

Having HTML tags in there is distracting.
Furthermore, there are various formats the documentation is rendered as.
Therefore, one needs to pick an easy-to-maintain format which is easy
to be converted in the other formats.  Having HTML as source format is
definitely not a good choice for that.

Finally, the GNU coreutils are just one package in the free software world,
and it adheres to the GNU standards.  Requesting to change the document format
here violates the standard, and is effectively done at the wrong end.

> The documentation at
> https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/index.html
> looks really good ! Examples and explanation.
> [...]
> From now on my goto reference.

Thanks for the affirmation.

Have a nice day,
Berny