Re: Info enhancements

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
>> From: Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>
>> Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2003 03:27:37 +0200
>> 
>> 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 appreciate your efforts and time you spent on hacking Info readers.
But I think more improvements are possible without changing the
current Info format.

> 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.

I think the main question with improvements is whether they are good
for most users or not.  Improvements that cause some troubles
(e.g. Info-hide-node-references) could be turned off by default.  And
users that want to use them should be ready to have some problems.

> Isn't the experience drawn from that experiment enough for us to
> understand the simple truth that
>
>    THOU SHALT NOT CHANGE INFO ANYMORE

But I'd rather say that

   THERE'S PLENTY OF ROOM FOR INFO IMPROVEMENT

And I mean improvement of Info readers, not improvement of the Info
format that might break something.  I think that even in its current
form the Info format is very useful.

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

I see there is an opinion that XML format will solve all problems of
Info format.  But I must warn that

   XML IS NOT A PANACEA

It solves some problems but introduces other problems.  Just to name
one of its problems: even such a trivial operation as text search on
a whole Info document (key `s' in Info readers) in XML will cause
several problems: to search a continuous text split by XML tags
(e.g. the text "abc" in the "a<b>b</b>c") a whole XML document should
be rendered to its textual representation before search, or some
complex rules should be used to collect text squashed between many
XML elements.

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