Re: Correspondence between web-pages and Info-pages

[Kelly Dean <kelly@prtime.org>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>> The solution to that, of course, is to simply have the browser
>> fetch through a cache, like standard web browsers do. To  install
>> files locally, just fetch them, then pin them in the cache.
>
> The manuals should be included in our packages and installed
> just as they are now.

What's the advantage?

If the Info browser (or HTML-Info browser or whatever) is going to support reading manuals online that the user doesn't already have a local copy of, which is a feature that other people in this thread have already said would be a good idea, then in practice, the browser is going to need a cache, for the same reason that standard web browsers have caches.

Using a cache, of course, means the browser will support looking in a local place (the cache) for manuals that the user tries to read, and if they're there, display them with no network traffic required. Since that cache will be needed anyway, I proposed to use it as the place to put the manuals that come with Emacs.

So when you rebut my proposal and say, ‟The manuals should be included in our packages and installed just as they are now”, it seems you're saying the manuals should be put in a different place P than the browser's cache C. What happens when the user enters the URL of a manual page? Local and online copies of the content are identical (since the version number will be encoded in the URL), so of course, the browser should check P, and if the content is there, not bother checking online.

But the browser also checks C. Since that's the case, what's the advantage of having P and C be different? They should be the same, for simplicity's sake. IOW, put the manuals in the cache (preload them there in Emacs releases), and pin them there by default.