[9fans] htmlroff

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

Is anyone interested in hacking on a simple version
of troff that generates html?  The idea is to implement
most of the troff base language and add primitives for
putting in raw html and watching to make sure tags get
matched properly.  It's considerably simpler than troff
since one doesn't have to deal with the low-level details
of text layout, character widths, and so on.

The idea is that then htmlroff could use the existing
macro packages more or less directly, perhaps with a
few small changes.  It would replace both ms2html,
which works at a higher level, and troff2html, which
works at a lower level.  It could format the manual
pages as well as the papers, and the resulting html
would actually look good and be easy to change
(just edit the macros).

Completing the picture would be versions of pic, eqn,
and tbl that emit SVG, MathML, and HTML tables.

I've started to cannibalize ms2html to build htmlroff,
but I really don't have much time to spend on it.

Russ