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

[Stephen Leake]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:
>> And also because the index-searching commands, without which you are
>> lost in a large manual, don't exist in the Web browsers out there.
>
> This is not at *all* hard to solve.  I have written HTML generators
> that produce index links myself in different contexts.

I'm not sure that "produce index links" and "index-searching commands"
are the same thing; Eli, could you elaborate on what commands you mean?

When I browse info, I use M-/ and/or C-s to search the index listings.

In any case, Texinfo produces index listings in html format;
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Index.html#Key-Index

Why reinvent this particular wheel?

>> And finally because Emacs documentation commands have
>> links that go to the respective manual and chapter, but no similar
>> features exist for external browsers.
>
> Generating that kind of link structure from any modern markup is
> almost trivial.  

Sure, it's trivial; so trivial that even Texinfo has it.

>> In sum, switching to a Web browser as the means to read documentation
>> is a regression.
>
> Except to pretty much the entire universe of new developers we need to
> recruit.

We are already meeting that need:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/

I've added that link to ./CONTRIBUTE; where else does it need to be?

-- 
-- Stephe