Re: The Info v. Man War of 2001 (was Re: Where do you RTFM ?)
"Karsten M. Self" <kmself@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 01:07:23PM -0600, John Hasler (john@dhh.gt.org) wrote:
>> 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].
But none of the current browsers I'm aware of has the index and
searching facilities that info has. When I'm stuck with html
documentation I'm always extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find
what I'm looking for.
[...]
> 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.
This probably has something to do with the conversion. I'm not
familiar with dwww, but I personally think that texi2html (you'll need
the texi sources) creates better html pages than anything you can get
out of a man page.
> 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?
texi2html does, if you have the texi sources.
Henrik
--
For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings.
And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable.
And we're going to do something about it.
-- George W. Bush
Reply to: