Re: HTML in addition to GNU Info? (was: ... instead ...)
Norbert Nemec <nobbi@cheerful.com> writes:
> | The unification of Debian documentation is being carried out via HTML.
>
> I think that speaks clearly. Now I sure do not want everybody to write raw
Well then we need to change it. The fact is that HTML is an extremely
poor language for much of anything of even moderate complexity, let
alone documentation for one large package or 3000 ones.
> would try to get as much documentation as possible installed in HTML format,
> we would have *one* neat tree where one is about sure to find what he
> searches. Ok, you say, dwww/dhelp will integrate the info documentation into
There are many problems with HTML:
* You can't get nice typeset output.
* Searching is inaccurate and difficult. At best, one searches on
all words in title or body. With other formats, it's possible to
search in only certain parts or sections (ie, ignore footnotes,
quotations, etc).
What about SGML?
What about those documents in formats that simply are too
sophisticated to convert to HTML? (This applies to a number of LaTeX
documents. Yes, I know there is a latex2html, but it can't even touch
some LaTeX stuff.)
> further hassle and resources. (Having everything on Info format would do
> this, too, but that will never happen, because you simply don't have all
> documentation in formats that can be converted to Info. In HTML that is much
> less of a problem.
Info also has problems. Navigation is horrid, it's even more
difficult to get a typeset copy from the .info files than it is from
.html, etc.
--
John Goerzen Linux, Unix consulting & programming jgoerzen@complete.org |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade) www.debian.org |
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The 956,076th digit of pi is 7.
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