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

[Christopher Allan Webber]

David Kastrup writes:

> Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Eric S. Raymond writes:
>>
>>> Karl Fogel <address@hidden>:
>>>> Actually, I think that might be *more* important than the exact choice
>>>> of markup language.  I hope we don't bikeshed.com the choice of markup
>>>> language to death.  ${ANYTHING_STANDARD_OR_ORG} is fine by me.
>>>
>>> Agreed.  I may have given the impression that I'm more attached to
>>> asciidoc per se than I am. It would be my first choice, but a reasoned
>>> case could be made for a couple of the others.
>>
>> Okay, sorry also that I may be responding to that a bit more than
>> anything.  Getting GNU's web documentation improved is an important
>> issue to me, and I really do want this to happen.
>>
>> I do agree that the importance of good web documentation is more
>> important than info support, and if somehow we got tossed into the fork
>> of needing to pick one or the other, I think nice looking web
>> documentation is more important to the long-term health of GNU.
>
> So tell me what you consider wrong with the Texinfo-generated web
> documentation of GNU LilyPond, arbitrary stuff like
> <URL:http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/guitar>.
> What parts of the documentation are "not nice looking" to a degree that
> would be bad for LilyPond's long-term health?

I think it's a big step up from most Texinfo exports, and while I think
it doesn't look as nice as a default sphinx export, it's proof that
Texinfo could be improved to be attractive enough to web users who want
to view the manual.

I think you're upset with me also, but note that I supported a variety
of solutions that kept a Texinfo output *and* got better HTML rendering,
including improving Texinfo HTML theming itself! :)

> I might add that we have several translations of all the web pages and
> manuals which are tightly maintained (and some that are basically in
> some left-behind state, not because of the amount of work Texinfo
> presents since translators do not even need to touch the Texinfo parts
> and, in contrast to some magic-cookie markup system like AsciiDoc are
> not likely to break stuff just by copying things) but rather the amount
> of work a good translation actually is.  Most of our translators (and
> documentation-focused developers) come from a Windows background and/or
> do not contribute significantly to code.

Sure, that's great!