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

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Note: I don't particularly care about the format of documentation.  Yet, I
do care about wrong information.

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> I once looked at the documentation for Org mode, and gave up.  It presented
> doing things I didn't find useful.

This is true for everybody.  There's plenty of features I don't know
anything about, though I semi-regularly contribute to Org.

We are offering two manuals.  The unabridged info manual and the compact
guide, which seems not to be shipped with Emacs, but is available here:

          http://orgmode.org/guide/
          http://orgmode.org/orgguide.pdf

> I did not see, at the beginning, how to use it as markup for manuals.

Perhaps start with the org guide, Chapter 11 Markup for rich export and 12
Exporting.  It's four pages.

Or give me an example paragraph and I will show you how to format it in
Org.

> Perhaps it says that later, but I did not get that far.

As pointed out earlier, Thomas S. Dye has converted the Org-manual to Org.
It's out of date, but may still be illustrative.

      https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tsdye/orgmanual/master/orgmanual.org

> I could consider Org mode as a way of formatting manuals if I saw
> documentation presenting Org mode _as_ a way to format manuals.
> However, it would still have two big drawbacks as a candidate for GNU
> documentation.
>
> * It is a program.  What we need is a format.

This claim is simply wrong.

          (info "(org) Org syntax")
and          
          http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html

> * The program runs only in Emacs.

Again, your claim is simply false.  The syntax is there and can be support
by anybody.  Other interpreters than org-element.el exists.  For instance,
Github supports a subset of the Org-syntax via org-ruby.  I think vim even
has some support of Org-syntax.

That being said, the export functionality is likely not going to be
re-implemented by other editors.  We can add a program called org-export
that simply exports using Emacs.

> Texinfo is a format and you can use any editor to write that format.

Same with Org.

—Rasmus

-- 
May the Force be with you