I believe having to deal with markup syntax poses a significant
barrier to those not as experienced as you.
From long experience, I can assure you that whatever you are used to
seems obvious and natural, and whatever you aren't seems strange and
difficult. I think nroff is swell, having been using it since about
1973, but on the rare occasions I show it to someone, their reaction
is about what I'd get if they looked into my kitchen and saw a bunch
of goat legs, a pile of coal, and a bellows.
Lots of people use XML editors like bbedit and xxe. They're not my
favorite, but they seem quite popular. Some of us weenies hand-edit
XML, which is not noticably more painful than hand-editing nroff or
any other text based markup language. (It's a lot easier than
hand-editing RTF, though.)
XML is clearly the future. The tools are way better, like saxon and
xsltproc which use templates to turn XML into web pages or whatever
else you want. (And no, running nroff source through troff isn't the
same thing.) If you want to use nroff, that's fine, but it's really a
dead end.
R's,
John
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