Re: A new online publishing tool for Texinfo documents.

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com>]

   Nic said, "It's an additional format to solve the specific problem
   of reading documentation that you don't happen to have on your
   local machine."

Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com> replied

   First of all, I question whether an additional format is required,
   since that will demand that Emacs and other Info readers be
   modified to support the new format.

But the proposed HTML format has nothing to do with Info!  It is a
different HTML format.  Its intent is to enable standards compliant
Web browsers to read documents on the Web (and if Web servers put in
the requisit CGI, to enable Web browsers to navigate via search).

   Second, everyone seems to agree that Info's search and navigation
   facilities are superior to HTML; so shouldn't we take advantage of
   that?

Right, that is why Info should not be changed (unless someone wants
to enhance it by enabling slow connections between an Info doc server
and the Info renderer; right now the connection must be fast).

   Third, Info files can be rendered very quickly (especially compared
   to HTML) because they have already been pre-processed from the
   Texinfo source, but the download time for Info is no worse than
   HTML because it's not much bigger than the source.

I do not understand you.  It takes me 17 minutes to download the Emacs
Lisp Reference Manual.  When I do the manual in Info format, I then
later read it in Info.  I do not wait 17 minutes and then start
reading.

The goal with the HTML/CGI proposal is that if I were to browse the
manual remotely in a Web browser, I would need to download only small
parts -- nodes most likely -- quickly, so I would not have to wait 17
minutes.

   Searching an entire document, whether it's in Info format or HTML
   and whether it's a monolithic entity or split into pieces still
   requires that the data be downloaded.

No, it does not.  That is the point of a CGI script.  You do *not*
have to download a whole document if the serving computer does the
work for you.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         Rattlesnake Enterprises
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.teak.cc                             bob@rattlesnake.com