Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Eric S. Raymond writes:

> Rüdiger Sonderfeld <ruediger@c-plusplus.de>:
>> Why not use org-mode instead?
>
> org mode has many virtues, but I don't believe it's powerful enough
> for highly structured, long-form documents.  Apparently RMS doesn't
> either, or he wouldn't have been receptive to the suggestion of
> asciidoc.

I think the asciidoc choice is very confusing.

I think changing things for emacs to make it more modern is good... when
it came to changing to a new DVCS, I agree with the move to git Git; in
terms of usage, this is the clear winner.  But who is using asciidoc
these days?  At least orgmode has a large and active userbase
(especially among emacs users... indeed, orgmode seems to be emacs'
biggest selling point amongst new uers these days from what I've seen.)

Furthermore, I went looking for an example document... what I found was:

  http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/book.html

To me, this does not look all so much cleaner and nicer than
TeXinfo... it still looks very 2002 to me.

Here is a project I am involved in that uses Sphinx, and this is fairly
default output:

  http://hy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Out of the box, this looks like a much more modern output.

(Again, Sphinx can support Texinfo if we really want it still, and I'm
sure many emacs users will... not that I am advocating Sphinx
specifically.)

But a lot of this is cosmetic.  We could improve Texinfo to look much
better probably (and that would positively affect a lot of existing GNU
projects).

But I really do not understand the choice of asciidoc.  Could you
explain further your reasoning?  It seems that to make asciidoc look
much nicer, it too will require quite a bit of theming... or could you
show examples to the contrary?  Any option of improving Texinfo's HTML
output, using Orgmode, using something currently popular like Sphinx,
makes much more sense to me.

But yes, by all means, let's make the emacs manuals' web output much
better.  (And GNU's generally!)

 - Chris