Re: Enhancements to options menu (was Re: Reveal mode)

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Simon Josefsson wrote:

> It later occured to me that I don't see a good reason for extended the
> Info format with these capabilities -- there is a perfectly fine
> format for text with hyperlinks and images called HTML (I hope that
> doesn't come as a suprise to anyone) and making a viewer in Emacs for
> texi2html converted manuals similar to Info is IMHO a better
> solution.

Using HTML is IMHO a much worse solution, since HTML doesn't support 
features like index searches without which a manual cannot be easily
used as a reference.  That is, if you need to quickly find information
about some very specific issue--a command, a key, a subject like "version 
control" or "compilation errors"--with HTML, all you have is text search, 
which is both inefficient and relies on the keywords to be actually
present in the text.

Many advanced Info features, including quite a few Emacs features related 
to documentation, use the Info indices extensively.

In any case, texi2html is not required since makeinfo is capable of 
producing HTML (and even DocBook, as of the latest release 4.2 of 
Texinfo).