On November 7, 2002 12:23 pm, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
Clearly the tools are an advantage, but I also think the markup syntax is better. Troff is not really that good, texinfo is better IMO; but with both you have a reasonable chance to read the document in source format, by simply skipping over some markup bits here and there. With SGML the markup is so intrusive that I find it impossible to skip over it and read the text, especially since the markup itself looks like text instead of looking like line noise.
An interesting point, I agree. But we are stuck with a lot of bad/broken standards, and SGML/XML is not the worse of the lot. Thing is, troff is a dying art, and it is very scary for the uninitiated. Texinfo is better, I agree, but it's really a nice thing, and it's not doing much better than troff (in terms of surviving).
As for the almost-content nature of the SGML markup, I am 100% with you. I find it very difficult to work on it, plain text. But if your editor supports syntax highlighting (and most do, nowadays), it can alleviate this problem quite significantly.
I just think that long term, sticking to troff, we're just raising the bar to entry. Oh well, I guess if you maintain it, it does not matter.