As the author of a fairly popular manual viewer for iOS[1], I was shocked when building the documents at the state of the tools and the availability of documentation for man. You would think that such a widely used command would have tonnes of information, formatting tools, parsing libraries, etc, plus articles and such - but surprisingly, there isn't that much available. Of the libraries that I found, many of them only supported certain formats or had strange bugs.

So, any improvements made to man are very much welcomed! I do feel, however, that a new format might be the best way to go - possibly something based loosely on Markdown or (my personal preference) JSON. I feel that if we had a more structured manpage format, we could do a lot more with it. I was hoping in my app, for example, to be able to pull out commands (e.g. enter "ls -lh" and it'll highlight the information for "-l" and "-h".) It is possible (http://explainshell.com/ does it really nicely) but it would be far easier with a nicely structured format.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/manuals-linux-bsd-manpages/i...