Hacker News Reader

I think you just described a man page. Except for the xml part. That sounds a lot more like something MS would do.

The man pages are intended for human and are not meant to be specs. An advanced NLP program is required to parse man pages and infer appropriate types and combinations and I suspect it would not be perfect.

I agree that this might lead to something which is not in Unix spirit but already shell completion provide such information and this shows the need for such specs.

If only there were an IEEE standard for utility conventions.

I assume you are referring to the POSIX spec on utilities (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/), which is helpful but not a full solution to the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com