Re: [Groff] RE: Simplifying groff documentation

[Eric S. Raymond]

Peter Schaffter <address@hidden>:
>                               Eric's Web-centric, fully-
> hypertexted documentation is the ideal, methinks, but not at the
> cost of losing the ability to type "man <whatever>" at the command
> line.

Agreed.  This is why I pushed a patch into man last year that teaches
it to do the right thing when sees HTML where it's expecting a man
page.  In theory, every man page on a Unix running current man(1)
could be converted in place to HTML tomorrow, and -- other than the
fact that presentation suddenly started coming through their browser
:-) -- users wouldn't notice the difference.  man foo would still
work.

That's what I want to do to info, too.  My vision is that all the
legacy help browsers become ways to point your browser at subtrees of
the HTML on your system.  /usr/share/man and /usr/share/info would be
the most important HTML subtrees, but there could be others, including
project-specific others.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>