Re: [Groff] man pages (tangential to Future Redux)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Ingo,

> Colin wrote:
> > I think it makes more sense to make sure man:foo and similar URLs do
> > sensible things in all the browsers people use.  While there are
> > exceptions, if you want to see something in a browser, it's usually
> > more natural to start from that browser's URL bar.
> 
> Oh yes.  That does certainly make sense to me.  If somebody types
> "man:foo" in a browser, it would certainly be nice if the browser
> could try to do something sensible with it, for example show a html
> rendering of a matching locally-installed manual, maybe even fall back
> to the web if no matching local page is found.

url(7) here mentions man:ls(1) but says it's not currently registered
with the IETF.  It also seems Mac OS X 10.3 onwards supports
x-man-path://2/sync in its Terminal program and elsewhere.

It would be nice to see a better standard emerge.  I'd like to be able
to reference a .SH by name, or an arbitrary explicitly-defined anchor.
All the while having it resolved into this machine's documentation;  if
I want to find a version on the web then that's a different search.

Cheers, Ralph.