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

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 08 Dec 2014 21:27:59 +0100 David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote: 

DK> Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden> writes:
>> I was answering your earlier question about evidence.  Writing ASCII
>> docs and asking you [Eli] to merge them is not fair to you.

DK> Shrug.  Making use of voluntary work without contributing back anything
DK> at all is "not fair", and it's what the majority of Emacs users do.
DK> That's more or less a builtin and _wanted_ side effect that the
DK> contributors perfectly well are aware of.

I mean, I could spend 15-30 minutes and get back to speed. Dumping work
on Eli doesn't scale, regardless of how willing he is to take it.

But more to the point of this thread, I actually *fear* those 15-30
minutes because it's mostly hunting for "how the hell do you highlight"
and "how do you update the index" and "will this break the docs and
annoy people" in my long-term memory. It's annoying. By contrast, I can
start typing Markdown very quickly because I already use it all the
time. This happens for me with any context switch, so I generally tend
to work in large blocks instead of switching tasks quickly.

As for Asciidoc, I looked into it. It's fairly compatible with Markdown
except it has tables and other things codified better, and its own
markup, and some of it looks like old-school manpages. I could live with
it, if Markdown was not an option (so it would be my second choice). Org
markup would still be last on my list because it's indisputably exotic,
as much as I like it. So my list of documentation format preferences
would be Markdown, then Asciidoc, then texinfo, and last Org. But that
doesn't mean I advocate switching, if anyone cares :)

Ted