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

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

[...]

>> Leaving out cross-manual refs would be a big loss for GNU as a project
>> to develop a coherent system, because manuals would be left isolated.
>
>
> Go to the Emacs manual, and type "i",

[...]

> So, the manuals already are isolated.

No, you’re talking about the index; I was referring to cross-manual
references.

Go to <http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html> and notice
that one can seamlessly navigate to the manuals it refers to, such as
libc, Binutils, Emacs, Geiser, etc.

The same thing works when that manual is installed locally: the Info
browser automatically follows links to other locally-installed manuals.

>> To me, if replacing Texinfo and/or Info results in loss of functionality
>> at all, that’s a showstopper.  I’m surprised alternative systems are not
>> studied with that in mind.
>
> I have this great idea for a hypertext system. What it will do is have
> globally unique identifiers, so that it is possible to put
> cross-references between any two documents published using this
> hypertext system. I shall the cross references IRIs (for Info Resource
> Identifiers), and the whole system will be WWI (World-Wide Info). Are
> you with me?

No.  URLs are global: that’s what the HTML output of Texinfo uses; fine.

But I also want to be able to browse documentation installed on my
system, and that actually corresponds to software versions installed on
my system.  In that case, URLs fall short.  Instead, the documentation
browser needs to look up locally-installed manuals in some search path.

I hope this clarifies what I intended to convey.

Thanks,
Ludo’.