Let me preface this by saying I realize it isn't really the best place to be saying this. I'm posting here more as an exercise of letting off steam than any expectation of real change.

Recently I was playing around with doing some automatic generation of various pieces of information from the copious documentation that comes with perl. For example, one of things I was playing with was attempting to make perldoc -X $var work in the same way that perldoc -f func works. It sounded simple and fairly easy to do. So I opened up perlvar.pod. Good lord, do they ever use the same convention twice? Head 1 tags there, head 2 tags here, random lists, etc. It was really not very nice to parse.

I realize at the time they came up with pod, they wanted a simple language anyone could use that would produce nicely formatted documentation. In that respect, it reminds me a lot of say, HTML2. Quick and simple, combining content and presentation. Well HTML has moved on, can POD move on also?

I hate to jump on the XML bandwagon and pointlessly use it, but it does seem like the best way for documentation to be self documenting, as it were. I suppose we could also solve this by just mandating a specific POD layout, or perhaps a version of POD with a higher emphasis on the metadata instead of the presentation.

Regardless of how we do it, can we please god get it done?!

20050913 Unconsidered by Corion. Was at "keep: 19 edit: 19 delete: 0" by monsieur_champs: "Please adjust title to something more aligned with your text, Its an interesting and needed proposal."

In reply to Please for the love of god, can I get a documentation format that doesn't suck? by BUU

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