on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 11:52:45PM +0100, Henrik Enberg (henrik@enberg.org) wrote: > "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. This is where the Unix philosophy takes over: simple tools, with well-defined tasks. Browsing and navigating content is one task. Searching and indexing it another. So you create a second tool to do the indexing. The search/index functionality of info should be extractable as a CGI or similar utility. A good browser (or command-line tool) will allow you to access that CGI readily, including by keystroke, if you wish. > [...] > > > 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. AFAICT, dwww uses info2html. > > 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. Thanks. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free We freed Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html
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