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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



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