POD has hardly changed during the last 2 decades as well, right?

POD didn't even exist 2 decades ago. In fact, POD is less than a decade old, it came with perl5. And, given what's going to happen with perl6, I wouldn't want to bet money on "POD will not change the next decade".

Besides, all POD tools are written in Perl. Having to install a dinosaur like Perl just to be able to deal with general documentation doesn't rock - it sucks. It's hardly any worse than requiring people to install Word or some other tool that reads Word format.

Abigail

But you don't! Any Joe Random User will understand what

=HEAD1 SYNOPSIS
[download]

means. There's rarely a lot more markup in POD and the spec is very simple - even if it changes in the future, the basic syntax (=FOO) is not going to change. The fact that the tools in existence are written in Perl is a red herring. In their absence, less works just as well. Of course the format is so simple you can easily write parsers in another language. I've used sed once.

I did mix up the "two decades" thing - code and docs were wrapped before Perl5 too, but I forgot the Perl4 way of doing that was *roff.

Makeshifts last the longest.

You are over estimating Joe Random User. =head1 isn't clear at all, let alone =head2. Maybe he would have understood =title and =section. And you really think Joe Random User is going to understand =over? Or L<text|name/sec>?

And if you are going to use a pager to read POD anyway, you'd be better off it it was written in plain ASCII.

Abigail