As a tangent, I remain impressed by manpage's staying power. GNU tried to move ahead with Info, a tree-based doc format and viewer, but that never really seems to have taken off, possibly due to UI issues (I'm always confused about how to use it) It's a pity: have you tried searching for something in, say, Bash's manpage? It's just a flattened version of its doc, and you're completely flooded with search results.
I suppose manpages are another example of "worse is better". They are extremely simple to use, which is what you want when you're frustrated and looking for that *$#& option to 'find'. And yet, the troff/groff formatters used by manpages can be pretty sophisticated (Kernighan mentioned in an interview [1] he still used it to write books, eschewing to complexity of Latex) and can produce a variety of formats, such as HTML or PostScript. Why don't distributions make more use of this? I miss the days where you could "man foo" in KDE's quick launch bar and get a nicely HTML formatted version in Konqueror.
I suppose manpages are another example of "worse is better". They are extremely simple to use, which is what you want when you're frustrated and looking for that *$#& option to 'find'. And yet, the troff/groff formatters used by manpages can be pretty sophisticated (Kernighan mentioned in an interview [1] he still used it to write books, eschewing to complexity of Latex) and can produce a variety of formats, such as HTML or PostScript. Why don't distributions make more use of this? I miss the days where you could "man foo" in KDE's quick launch bar and get a nicely HTML formatted version in Konqueror.
[1] https://rkrishnan.org/posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.h...