Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[David Kastrup]

Drew Adams <address@hidden> writes:

>> I frequently point people to particular nodes of our online HTML
>> manuals that could answer their question.  The way I do that is
>> to find the information in Info, then copy&paste some recognizably
>> unique text phrase into a web search engine, check that the
>> reference this turns up is the corresponding online version of
>> the Info manual and then post the HTML link.
>
> Same here.  Except I don't bother to search the web.  I just go
> to the GNU Emacs or Elisp manual on the web (separate HTML page
> per node version), search the TOC (first page) for the node name,
> and copy the URL of the link to that node.
>
> I do this often.  Instead of just answering questions, it is
> most helpful to *point users to the doc*, so they get additional
> info and they get the benefit of well thought out presentation.
>
> It is even more helpful to also to tell them how _they_ can find
> such doc, by *asking Emacs* directly.
>
> Probably what I should do is write an Emacs command that does
> all of that from an Info node: grab the URL to that same manual
> node on the web.  But it's so quick to get it manually that I
> haven't bothered, so far.

To make that work reliably it might be reasonable to create a Texinfo
command to specify the "canonical" web location and have this converted
into something in Info that the info reader can recognize and interpret.

This should actually even be workable for the standalone Info reader.
Of course it relies on the HTML node name generation being the same as
the Info reader can readily guess.

-- 
David Kastrup