=head1 TITLE Add change bar functionality to pod =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Dan Sugalski Date: 8 Aug 2000 Mailing List: perl6-language@perl.org Number: 65 Version: 1 Status: Developing =head1 ABSTRACT Documents change, and change bars are a nice way to indicate what's changed. This RFC suggests a way to indicate the changed parts of a document that POD2whatever translators can mark appropriately. The change bars should also be distinct to the reader of the raw POD. =head1 DESCRIPTION Making what's changed in documentation stand out's quite useful, something I'm coming to appreciate more and more as the RFCs are flying back and forth. The standard way to do this is to mark the changed sections with one or more vertical bars on the left margin. Since changes can themselves be changed, multiple levels of change bar can occur. This mirrors the common practice in printed documentation. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION The pod parser modules look for the sequence /^|+\s/ at the beginning of a line and, if it's there, that line is considered as changed. The number of bars in front of a line indicates the number of bars in front of the text in the formatted output. If, when outputtiing a line, there is any changed text in it, then the entire line is marked as changed. So, for example, if the POD looked like: this is | a line the output would be: | this is a line since at least one character on the formatted version was changed. =head1 REFERENCES Every piece of good documentation for version 1.1 or higher of something.