Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 15:51:34 +0100 (CET) From: Martin Horcicka <horcicka@vol.cz> To: <freebsd-doc@freebsd.org> Subject: man, TOC, xml... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.30.0101161434550.25916-100000@k2.vol.cz>
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Hi, I have some questions related to manual pages: 1. classification ----------------- In my opinion this is the main problem of man. Pages are classified to nine sections but these are too few to find the right page quickly when one is searching by subject. I am not sure if more sections would help - maybe it would be better to develop some mechanism to automatically create table of contents or something like this. On the other hand, the independence of particular manual pages is surely one of the key features bringing the wide usage of the whole manual system. Maybe some compromise would be OK. The first thing coming to my mind is a separate database keeping some tree structure of sections and related manual pages (e.g. every manual page would be mentioned in one or more sections). It would be very simple to create new sections, subsub...sections and to assign manual page links to them. The operations would be as simple as creating directories, files and symlinks. All the pages in the OS distribution would be assigned to proper sections and the pages from ports could (but need not) register in the TOC database. Program used to browse the tree of sections would find the unassigned pages and would present them separately. 2. internal structure --------------------- groff is really not my favourite typesetting system and -mdoc macro package tries to do with it something which is usually used sgml or xml for. In addition, use of groff brings the unability to check the correctness of the man page internal structure (in contrast to xml), not mentioning easy internationalization etc. Would not it be better to develop a DTD for xml and some format transformation system to create new manual system in xml? It should not be a problem to make the old and the new system coexist together. 3. manual browser ----------------- I am sure, some hypertext browser would be really better than the presently used more/less. In conjunction with the xml manual system it would be maybe easier to write it. These are my ideas. Could you tell me yours? Martin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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