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Re: man pages & info prefer HTML format


From: Kaz Kylheku
Subject: Re: man pages & info prefer HTML format
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2023 22:11:29 -0700
User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.4.13

On 2023-09-24 05:37, Dennis German wrote:
> After the  years and fine tuning of basic HTML, why
> aren't the man pages standardized to HTML format?

The official documentation for GNU Coreutils is the
texinfo pages, not man pages.

Info renders to HTML. The HTML doc for GNU Coreutils is
hosted here: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/
It has internal hyperlink and makes use of fonts and all.
It's built from the same documentation source files as
what you see when you run the terminal-based info program.

(HTML can be obtained from man pages, but it's a hacky
process. There are multiple converters that suck in
different ways.)

Writing documentation natively in HTML, rather than through
a markup language which generates HTML, is suboptimal.

It will result in something that cannot be easily
shown in plain text.  There are text-only browsers, but
they don't render things as nicely as a dedicated mark-up
format designed with plain text support.

People actually working with utilities like to look
at documentation in the same environment, often in the
same terminal session.



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