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

[David Kastrup]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>> So name a single respect in which any proposal is significantly better.
>> So far we had "it's new and hipper, so for the next two years it might
>> garner more fans".  What else?
>
> Increased visibility to search engines.  That's really important!

Red herring.  Texinfo-generated HTML is found just fine by search
engines.  I do it all the time for LilyPond's manuals.

Now LilyPond's manuals are nice and helpful with lots of images, and
people are referred to it a lot partly because of that.  So it has good
link coverage which makes search engines happy.

So it boils down to "make your manuals good and helpful so that people
refer to it a lot".  The temporary hipness of the source language does
not really play into that a lot.

If we add a command to the Info reader that will crank out the
corresponding web page for locally installed Info documentation so that
it can easily be cut and pasted into a reply on a public mailing list
for reference, this will do a lot more for increased page rank to search
engines (if they are GNU _manuals_ linked to on the project pages, they
are of course _visible_ to search engine crawlers) than messing with its
source language.

-- 
David Kastrup