In a discussion in the Emacs developer list it came up that a frequent process for many people using Info is
a) use the Info indexing commands and/or full text search or other navigation to find some piece of information b) cut and paste some recognizable sentence from the vicinity into a web search engine c) pick out a link in the search results in the official HTML online documentation d) check that link to lead to the write place e) copy and paste it as a reference to some reply in a mailing list that failed to find something in the documentation, either because of searching unsuccessfully or not searching at all. Obviously, converting to a link in the "official" documentation should be better implemented as a single command in the Info reader. However, to make that work reliably for unknown documents, the Info file should likely contain a pointer to the root node of the online HTML documentation. Putting it there would entail some representation in the Info format, and it would require a representation in Texinfo source as well. It would seem like a good idea to me in the long run: pointing people to the online documentation (and currently, that tends to be just HTML even though having some non-local transport for straightforward Info might also be an interesting option) is a frequent use of the local browsers. This could even be applicable to locally installed HTML versions but I don't know what user-level controls for this kind of "convert into web link" a normal HTML browser would offer. -- David Kastrup
