There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup. The problem is
in a situation like
<para>
<command>FOO</command> is ...
there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO". In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.
So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like
<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>
So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace. I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
This doesn't do any remote or external things yet, but it gives modules
like plproxy and dblink a standardized and future-proof system for
managing their connection information.
Martin Pihlak and Peter Eisentraut