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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 02:24:11 -0800
> From: Paul Eggert <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 90% of the effort of writing good documentation is not producing markup
> 
> True, but if we can make the process of writing documentation even 5% more 
> efficient or 5% more inviting, that could well be such a long-term win that 
> it's 
> worth the conversion hassle.

Sure, any optimization is for the best.  But the main problems are not
solved by that, and this thread seems to be aimed at much more than
just 7% improvements.

Moreover, a 7% or a 10% percent improvement does not justify a change
ion our toolchain.

> > if there is some language feature supported by a future Texinfo
> > that is a must, I will definitely switch to it
> 
> As I recall, you had another objection to Texinfo 5: it quotes with curly 
> quotes 
> “like this”, not with ASCII quotes "like this", and you are concerned that 
> some 
> older Info readers might be confused by the non-ASCII quotes.

Yes, but as time goes by, the old viewers disappear into oblivion and
cease being relevant.  E.g., someone submitted a patch to make the
stand-alone Info reader reasonably support curly quotes even on a
Windows console.

> Anyway, no matter what the reason for not upgrading, in the meantime we're 
> stuck 
> with old-technology Texinfo, and this is partly why it might be a good idea 
> to 
> think about changing.

I'm not opposed to thinking about a change; who would be?  And not
just think, IMO: we should try to improve Texinfo and its back-ends as
much as we can.  But that's not my point.

My point is that if the alternative is AsciiDoc, then at this time the
switch would be a disaster for the quality of the Emacs documentation.
Heck, we don't even have a decent Emacs mode for writing AsciiDoc (the
2 modes available out there IMO don't come close to what we have for
Texinfo).  Until all of this gets taken care of by the enthusiasts, or
until some other document-writing system emerges that is significantly
better, it makes very little sense to switch.