on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 05:28:56PM -0600, Bud Rogers (budr@sirinet.net) wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 December 2001 16:52 pm, Henrik Enberg wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Me too. And when I'm stuck with info documentation I am often
> extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. I
> don't think that is an info vs html issue. I think it is a problem not of
> the document format or protocol, but of the structure of the document
> itself. The problem is not the tool used to produce the document
> but the person producing the document.
>
> In defense of info I would say this: it predates html.
Actually, they're very nearly coincident.
The info changelog starts with a June 26, 1988 entry by RMS. Tim
Berners-Lee's work on HTML and the World Wide Web started at CERN in
1988:
In 1980 I played with programs to store information with random
links, and in 1989, while working at the European Particle Physics
Laboratory, I proposed that a global hypertext space be created in
which any network-accessible information could be refered to by a
single "Universal Document Identifier". Given the go-ahead to
experiment by my boss, Mike Sendall, I wrote in 1990 a program
called "WorlDwidEweb", a point and click hypertext editor which ran
on the "NeXT" machine.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html
Various concepts concerning hyperlinked texts have been kicked around
since, depending on your perspective and definitions, the 1980s, 70s,
60s, or 50s, with the work of Marshal McLuhan and Vannevar Bush. By the
mid-1980s, there was already a hypertext conference...and Jakob Nielsen
was there:
http://www.useit.com/papers/tripreports/ht87.html
By that time, we'd already seen Ted Nelson's Xanadu proposal, the Apple
Hypercard stack, work by Xerox (another blown PARC chance...),
The Nielsen report makes for IMO interesting reading, it's a good
historical referrent from just before the emergence of a number of
systems we're currently discussing. Interesting is footnote 10, which
refers to the "getting lost" problem. There are additional "early /
precursor days of the Web" reports at:
http://www.useit.com/papers/tripreports/
> AFAIK it was the first widely known or used hypertext documentation
> protocol.
Not quite, by 10-20 years depending on your reckoning. But one of the
earlier implementations.
> In criticism of info I would say this: it predates html.
Heh!
> AFAICT it hasn't changed a bit. We have learned a quite a bit about
> hypertext since info was developed. Info was a marvel in its day, but
> it is IMHO simply obsolete.
>
> Now I'm not trying to defend html in particular, although well written
> html documentation can be very nice to read and quite intuitive to
> navigate. So too can info, for that matter. I would much prefer well
> written, well structured documentation in some more universal format,
> like docbook, which can produce output to suit the reader's
> preference. Those who prefer html or postscript or pdf or plain text
> or even info for that matter, can read the docs in the format they
> prefer. That's what I'd like to see.
Agreement.
--
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