[GRASS-dev] Manpage HTML markup consistency

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> > The real problem is that the format of those files
> > isn't documented anywhere. Generic HTML documentation doesn't help,
> > because g.html2man doesn't understand arbitrary HTML, nor will any
> > replacement.
> > 
> > If you're going to settle on some subset of HTML as the source
> > language, you need to specify exactly which subset that is.
> 
> http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass/trunk/tools/g.html2man/htmltags.txt

It isn't just an issue of which tags, but the syntax of those tags. 
E.g. HTML allows line breaks in the middle of a tag, and it allows
literal < and > characters in an attribute value. g.html2man doesn't
cope with either of those (most ad-hoc parsers don't).

There's also the issue of semantics, e.g. how those tags get
translated to nroff, how to link to related documentation, etc.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>