Re: allowing L<text|href>

Ricardo Signes <[email protected]> writes:

> The long-lost question of "Why can't we have L<text|href>?" came up this
> week on p5p.  David Wheeler and I spoke about the issue briefly, because
> we couldn't find anything in perlpod or perlpodspec that really
> specifically addressed the reason other than "because it would be
> difficult."

> I did a fair big of archive-diving and found two basic arguments:

> (1) Sean Burke was fighting against very painful parsing code and wanted to
>     keep things as simple as possible, which was "not very simple" to begin
>     with.  Adding this seemed too hard, and it was declared off limits.

> (2) It was unclear how non-hypertext formatters would choose to render links
>     with text.

> As to (2), I think it's up to the formatter, many of them already deal
> with this problem, and I do not think any formatter author will be
> terribly inconvenienced by it.

> As for (1), I think that it is actually not difficult, and merely
> appeared so due to the software involved at the time.  David and I
> whipped up what I believe is a fairly complete and mostly unambiguous
> grammar:

I was in favor of this originally and am still in favor of it now.  I
think we should support it and am happy to find a way of representing the
results textually in Pod::Text and Pod::Man.  It will produce much nicer
HTML output.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>