[DOC-SIG] Library reference manual debate

[Paul Prescod]

Case Roole wrote:
> Just wondering: for HTML generation I use "megatags", non-HTML tags in
> documents that are otherwise HTML. An SGML parser (derived from the one
> in sgmllib) lets pure HTML pass, but fetches and processes the data
> embedded in these megatags (example below). This is decidedly not pure
> SGML or pure HTML, but the *code is extremely readable*. Is this what
> everybody is using the SGMLParser for, is it irrelevant for the matter
> discussed here, or is this a good idea?

SGML was explicitly designed to allow this and has features to do this
sort of thing for you. A full SGML parser can interpret your "=" symbol
and even your newlines as tags. This is very convenient for typists. I
think that for novice users it will probably be quite confusing,
however, because people are used to all SGML markup being in clearly
marked tags, not in ordinary-looking characters. Also to parse something
like this in Python we would either have to complicate sgmllib or
introduce another layer of parsing.
 
 Paul Prescod

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