Re: docstrings and elisp reference

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Etienne Prud’homme <e.e.f.prudhomme@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2017 01:20:26 -0400
> Cc: stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org, drew.adams@oracle.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org

I think I've said enough in this thread, so just 2 more comments:

> That is where _most_ GNU projects seem to lack the capability.  It looks
> like Jean-Christophe was right in pointing out it might be because we’re
> not using HTML exporting templates at its best.
> 
> GNU projects are usually harder to index because of that.  Thus we have
> a minority of GNU tools listed.  I’m not saying that for criticizing
> GNU, but I think it’s an important issue we could address in the near
> future.

Texinfo can produce HTML (which can be customized) and XML from the
Texinfo sources.  These facilities can be used to enhance the
"indexing" (I'd call it "tagging" instead, to discern from the indices
we have in the manuals) of the produced documentation, if that is the
feature you think is missing in the Info manuals.  Then preparing a
document in the structure you want for any GNU project should be very
easy.  It's possible that the Texinfo language might need some
additions to support some of that, but that should be no problem,
given the active development of the Texinfo package.

> Of course, this discussion is about Emacs.

And therein is my second issue: reading the Bash and the ELisp manuals
in Zeal, I'm presented with exactly the same contents as when I read
them in Emacs's Info.  IOW, what I have in Zeal is an Info browser
without the index-searching facilities which make Info so efficient
for me.  So for me, and especially in the context of Emacs, it makes
very little sense to talk about these browsers, because they seem to
give be a subset of what we already have in Info.  Perhaps I'm missing
something important.