Andrei's Google Talk

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-08-06 17:41, Alexander Malakhov wrote:
> Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> писал(а) в своём письме Fri,
> 06 Aug 2010 18:28:41 +0700:
>
>> 2. It seems like the documentation is HTML written as ddoc. I see $(P)
>> tags, $(LI) tags, etc. Can't we just write it as HTML?
>
> I have had exactly same thought when I've first seen DDoc a week ago
>
>
>> I think many would feel much more comfortable that way.
>
> I have virtually zero exp with HTML/XML, but DDocs syntax seems to be
> pretty
> straightforward
>
>> It's also more supported by editors. I forgot a closing parentheses on
>> one tag, and it screwed up the entire page. I had to find it by hand,
>> whereas an HTML editor could red-flag a tag without a closing tag, or
>> you could run it through an XML verifier (if it's xhtml).
>
> Good points. And XML is not going to disappear anytime soon, so there will
> always be a lot of people familiar with it, as wall as tool for it.
> So I think it would be reasonable to have <tag/> syntax and HTML tags
> like <B>, <I> etc.
>
> Also, for example, what if I want to put extra ')' paren into $(D text)?
> I think there is (simple) solution, but that is one more thing to learn.
> In the end it's just markup language and I don't see much use in learning
> more then one of them.
>
> One reason of it I can think of: parsing speed and ambiguities (same as
> with <templates>)
>
> Anyway, when D will take over the world, they will have to change HTML
> syntax to fit what everyone already knows )

One reason is why HTML is not used directly is that you could output the 
documentation in other formats than HTML, like PDF. A second reason to 
use macros (i.e. $(B arg)) instead of HTML is that this allows you to 
have the macro expand into something like this <span 
class="bold">arg</span> instead of <b>arg<b>. Of course one could define 
a language in XML to use instead of the macros.


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg