Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[David Kastrup]

Lennart Borgman <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> David Kastrup writes:
>>
>>  > There is actually another hidden hurdle that has not been
>>  > mentioned: the target format "Info" is not independent from the
>>  > manual's organization of content: content is organized into
>>  > node-sized chunks, with a somewhat hierarchical organization
>>  > intended to make all non-bottom nodes fit on a screen if feasible
>>  > in order to make navigation fast.
>>
>> I don't think this is a big problem, though.  I don't see any reason
>> why the organization into "nodes" or "pages" (as in the original
>> intent of *nix "man page") would change.  It's the obvious way (at
>> least to me) to provide modularity in documentation to correspond to
>> the modularity of the program.
>
>
> With HTML5 you can use "ajax" which can make it very fast to fetch
> small nodes. You simply just update that information on the web page
> (instead of fetching the whole web page).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

A glimmer of possible solutions on the horizon does not seem like a
sufficient incentive to throw an established working large established
system overboard.

Emacs has enough to work on without being the loss leader for new
documentation approaches.  Emacs is where Texinfo and Info are a
best-fit solution, and 100% of Emacs users have the Emacs Info reader
available.  If one wants to experiment with alternative approaches,
something like the glibc documentation would make a better candidate as
it has much fewer inherent ties to the Texinfo/Info universe.

-- 
David Kastrup