I suspect it's difficult to view this from the point of view of someone like me, but references to HTML are, to me, part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It took me years to understand the point of the paragraph tags. The text was improved dramatically some time ago, but even now, the phrase "PerlMonks-approved HTML" is one I find daunting.

I'm not here to learn HTML. I don't want to learn it as I have no use for it. I want to learn Perl, and that's hard enough. I've learned a little HTML because Pod2RTF doesn't produce a file that MessWord can read. The only other thing accountants (me and my audience) are likely to read is a web page, and since Pod2HTML is buggy, I've had to investigate the issues and find workarounds. Even that is a yak I'd rather not shave, so when I see "PerlMonks-approved HTML", it looks to me as though I must learn HTML and then the PM version of it in which I may have to unlearn some of the HTML I just learned. I really want to avoid shaving those yaks.

I would therefore suggest cutting down the current guidelines to something along the lines of "Posts are HTML formatted. If you want to know more about this, see Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Otherwise, " followed by the current text on code & paragraph tags. But the huge body of text on HTML that follows it makes my eyes glaze over even now.

I accept that I'm hardly a typical user and that huge amounts of Perl are used in combination with HTML. But, to me at least, the heavy stress on HTML makes asking questions here less approachable.

Regards,

John Davies