Really interesting thoughts coming from the groff mailing list:
"Because of poverty owing to neglect -- that is, necessity being the mother of invention -- the author of the article I linked to decided he'd like color in his man pages. Where did he turn? A style sheet in the groff framework, perhaps? Any kind of improvement to the semantic-display connection? No, he reached about as far down as possible, and tweaked the control sequences emitted to the emulator. Because he could. Because, in a way, he had to, insofar as that strange bit of arcania gave him the most leverage.
"So, yes, he's still working with a text terminal, after a fashion. But the programmability of that text terminal is an accident of history, its feature set long since made obsolete -- not useless, but out-moded -- by graphical displays and GUIs. That he reached for that particular tool is a measure of how far we have come, and how far we have not."
"Because of poverty owing to neglect -- that is, necessity being the mother of invention -- the author of the article I linked to decided he'd like color in his man pages. Where did he turn? A style sheet in the groff framework, perhaps? Any kind of improvement to the semantic-display connection? No, he reached about as far down as possible, and tweaked the control sequences emitted to the emulator. Because he could. Because, in a way, he had to, insofar as that strange bit of arcania gave him the most leverage.
"So, yes, he's still working with a text terminal, after a fashion. But the programmability of that text terminal is an accident of history, its feature set long since made obsolete -- not useless, but out-moded -- by graphical displays and GUIs. That he reached for that particular tool is a measure of how far we have come, and how far we have not."
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2016-08/msg00034.ht...
Thread root: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2016-08/msg00013.ht...