Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Tue 23 Dec 2014, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>> You just gave up too soon, that's all.
>
> No I didn't.  I switched from the info index (which didn't work for me first
> time) to a search engine (which did).  Why should I insist on slowing myself
> down with inferior technology?

Your sample size is too small to have any statistical significance. I
have usually found search engines to be vastly inferior to a manual with
a good index, but both mechanisms are useful and both are needed.

> Of course this was just one example, but it's representative.  It's long been
> my experience that search engines work better than traditional indexes for
> most of my questions about Emacs functionality.  And I don't think my
> experience is at all atypical.  Feel free to tweak the manually-maintained
> index, but in the end I expect the tweaks won't benefit most users.

The popular search engines are close to useless for focussed searches
these days, as they are far more interested in delivering advertising
than in producing useful results.

Using a search engine usually results in several pages of irrelevant
links, each of which must be followed in the forlorn hope that any of
them contain anything pertinent and up to date.

Everyone seems to agree that texinfo could do with some performance
improvements. While the info format could happily be jettisoned in
favour of something else, the discussion in this thread seems mostly
about bikeshedding something new and incompatible with any existing
tooling.

The markup used for documentation is not an impediment to writing
documentation - on this ESR is flat out wrong. Eli's offer to add texinfo
markup to documentation written by those without knowledge of info will
result in no extra work, as that offer will not be taken up by anyone.

The use of Texinfo or any other markup format is irrelevant to the
production of high quality documentation. The creation of the initial
plain text prose  is the heart of the problem. Markup and editorial
fixes can be added to existing text, but changing the markup does not
magically produce a working text from thin air.

    AndyM