on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 01:07:23PM -0600, John Hasler (john@dhh.gt.org) wrote:
> I wrote:
> > What is emacs-centric about (N)ext, (P)revious, (U)p, (S)earch, and ENTER?
>
> Karsten M. Self writes:
> > How about the fact that NPU have no relationship to your _own_ path
> > through the documentation tree...
>
> What does that have to do with my question?
14 and green ducks.
> > ...as they would in, say, a web browser, which is, along with
> > 'less', the most common text-reading environment most of us know.
>
> I thought you were a man page enthusiast. Now you want html
> documentation? IMHO html is a lousy choice.
It's a well known standard. I know a lot of people (including many
nontechnical ones) who spend hours in a web browser. I don't know many
people (including many technical ones) who spend comperable time in the
info browser. It's a familiarity issue. Sometimes the familiar is
superior to the "good". Say what you will about the Web, it abstracts
content from the reading tool. I can read with Galeon, Mozilla, Konq,
MSIE, w3m, lynx, links, or dumped to a textfile and paged with less [1].
> Michael Mauch writes:
> > What's wrong with the (L)ast key? And then, of course, you have the
> > (S)earch key and most of the times an (I)ndex.
>
> And, of course, there is 'info info' for those who actually want to learn
> to use info.
As I noted: the 'man' man page is transitive between man and info --
you can get the full man page from within info. The 'info'
documentation is assymetric: you can't get useful information from
within man, which, if it's your preferred or known environment, is where
you know how to operate. This is a Bad Thing®.
Having spent a half hour or so browsing info pages via Web through dwww,
I have to say that info makes worse web pages than either man or
DocBook, though the DocBook document structure resembles the info
structure largely.
Note too: with DocBook, you've got the option of splitting a document
at major section breaks, or dumping it as One Big File®, depending on
your SGML parsing arguments. Anyone know if Info's got a similar
functionality?
Peace.
----------------------------------------
Notes:
1. Not uncommon for me when snarfing content with lynx -- I *really*
don't care for default lynx colors and navkey bindings, and haven't
been able to grok its config file to change this. W3M wins heavily
over lynx for the former's ease of configuration.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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