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

[Eric S. Raymond]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:
> > > Until there is a documentation viewer available in Elisp that is almost
> > > as good as Info-mode while being prettier,
> > 
> > Does a web browser not qualify?
> 
> Not to me, not as progress from the current situation.
> 
> > If not, why not?
> 
> Because copy/pasting docs from a separate program while working on
> something in Emacs is an annoyance

Granted.  But eww is part of the background conditions now.  Emacs
itself is a browser, and will become a better one.

> 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.

> 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.  If you don't understand this it is unsurprising that
you are opposed.  But it is quite surprising that you don't understand.

> 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.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>