Editing Plain Old Documentation (section)

==Design==
Pod is designed to be a simple, clean language with just enough syntax to be useful.  It purposefully does not include mechanisms for fonts, images, colors or tables.  Some of its goals are:
* Easy to parse
* Easy to convert to other formats, such as [[XML]], [[TeX]] or [[Markdown]]
* Easy to incorporate sample code
* Easy to read without a pod formatter (i.e. in its source-code form)
* Easy to write in

An extended version of pod that supports tables and footnotes called PseudoPOD has been used by [[O'Reilly & Associates]] to produce several Perl books, most notably ''[[Programming Perl]]'' by [[Larry Wall]], [[Tom Christiansen]], and Jon Orwant.

Pod makes it easy to write [[Manpage|manual pages]], which are well suited to user-oriented documents. In contrast, other documentation systems, such as Python's [[Docstring]] or Java's [[Javadoc]], though they can be used for user documentation, are designed to facilitate generating developer-oriented documentation about the source code for a software project.