Re: Info enhancements

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il>]

> From: Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>
> Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 03:27:37 +0200
> 
>      See also `append' in *Note Building Lists::, `concat' in *Note
>      Creating Strings::, and `vconcat' in *Note Vectors::, for other
>      ways to copy sequences.
> 
> Such kind of references has at least two big drawbacks:

I think these drawbacks stem from the basic limitations of the Info
format.  People nowadays are more accustomed to HTML and similar
hyper-text formats, where the actual pointer is hidden, that's why the
somewhat naive Info format looks bad to them.

> I believe this enhancement can easily be done with the existing Info
> format.

And having spent many hours hacking makeinfo and the stand-alone Info
reader, I believe, like Karl does, that doing that is a complete waste
of time and effort.  I think we basically have reached the point where
no significant improvements could be done to Info without breaking
something somewhere else.  Evene the relatively simple change such as
Info-hide-node-references caused a series of unintended consequences
that we haven't fixed yet to the full extent.  Isn't the experience
drawn from that experiment enough for us to understand the simple
truth that

   THOU SHALT NOT CHANGE INFO ANYMORE

?

I say, if we want a better reader of the docs, let's invest our energy
in an XML-based reader.