The Info v. Man War of 2001 (was Re: Where do you RTFM ?)
on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 01:07:23PM -0600, John Hasler ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I wrote: What is emacs-centric about (N)ext, (P)revious, (U)p, (S)earch, and ENTER? Karsten M. Self writes: How about the fact that NPU have no relationship to your _own_ path through the documentation tree... What does that have to do with my question? 14 and green ducks. ...as they would in, say, a web browser, which is, along with 'less', the most common text-reading environment most of us know. I thought you were a man page enthusiast. Now you want html documentation? IMHO html is a lousy choice. It's a well known standard. I know a lot of people (including many nontechnical ones) who spend hours in a web browser. I don't know many people (including many technical ones) who spend comperable time in the info browser. It's a familiarity issue. Sometimes the familiar is superior to the good. Say what you will about the Web, it abstracts content from the reading tool. I can read with Galeon, Mozilla, Konq, MSIE, w3m, lynx, links, or dumped to a textfile and paged with less [1]. Michael Mauch writes: What's wrong with the (L)ast key? And then, of course, you have the (S)earch key and most of the times an (I)ndex. And, of course, there is 'info info' for those who actually want to learn to use info. As I noted: the 'man' man page is transitive between man and info -- you can get the full man page from within info. The 'info' documentation is assymetric: you can't get useful information from within man, which, if it's your preferred or known environment, is where you know how to operate. This is a Bad Thing®. Having spent a half hour or so browsing info pages via Web through dwww, I have to say that info makes worse web pages than either man or DocBook, though the DocBook document structure resembles the info structure largely. Note too: with DocBook, you've got the option of splitting a document at major section breaks, or dumping it as One Big File®, depending on your SGML parsing arguments. Anyone know if Info's got a similar functionality? Peace. Notes: 1. Not uncommon for me when snarfing content with lynx -- I *really* don't care for default lynx colors and navkey bindings, and haven't been able to grok its config file to change this. W3M wins heavily over lynx for the former's ease of configuration. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.comhttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/Land of the free We freed Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html pgpdYA3CsX1dB.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: The Info v. Man War of 2001 (was Re: Where do you RTFM ?)
Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.com writes: on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 01:07:23PM -0600, John Hasler ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I thought you were a man page enthusiast. Now you want html documentation? IMHO html is a lousy choice. It's a well known standard. I know a lot of people (including many nontechnical ones) who spend hours in a web browser. I don't know many people (including many technical ones) who spend comperable time in the info browser. It's a familiarity issue. Sometimes the familiar is superior to the good. Say what you will about the Web, it abstracts content from the reading tool. I can read with Galeon, Mozilla, Konq, MSIE, w3m, lynx, links, or dumped to a textfile and paged with less [1]. But none of the current browsers I'm aware of has the index and searching facilities that info has. When I'm stuck with html documentation I'm always extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. [...] Having spent a half hour or so browsing info pages via Web through dwww, I have to say that info makes worse web pages than either man or DocBook, though the DocBook document structure resembles the info structure largely. This probably has something to do with the conversion. I'm not familiar with dwww, but I personally think that texi2html (you'll need the texi sources) creates better html pages than anything you can get out of a man page. Note too: with DocBook, you've got the option of splitting a document at major section breaks, or dumping it as One Big File®, depending on your SGML parsing arguments. Anyone know if Info's got a similar functionality? texi2html does, if you have the texi sources. Henrik -- For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it. -- George W. Bush
Re: The Info v. Man War of 2001 (was Re: Where do you RTFM ?)
on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 11:52:45PM +0100, Henrik Enberg ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.com writes: on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 01:07:23PM -0600, John Hasler ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: I thought you were a man page enthusiast. Now you want html documentation? IMHO html is a lousy choice. It's a well known standard. I know a lot of people (including many nontechnical ones) who spend hours in a web browser. I don't know many people (including many technical ones) who spend comperable time in the info browser. It's a familiarity issue. Sometimes the familiar is superior to the good. Say what you will about the Web, it abstracts content from the reading tool. I can read with Galeon, Mozilla, Konq, MSIE, w3m, lynx, links, or dumped to a textfile and paged with less [1]. But none of the current browsers I'm aware of has the index and searching facilities that info has. When I'm stuck with html documentation I'm always extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. This is where the Unix philosophy takes over: simple tools, with well-defined tasks. Browsing and navigating content is one task. Searching and indexing it another. So you create a second tool to do the indexing. The search/index functionality of info should be extractable as a CGI or similar utility. A good browser (or command-line tool) will allow you to access that CGI readily, including by keystroke, if you wish. [...] Having spent a half hour or so browsing info pages via Web through dwww, I have to say that info makes worse web pages than either man or DocBook, though the DocBook document structure resembles the info structure largely. This probably has something to do with the conversion. I'm not familiar with dwww, but I personally think that texi2html (you'll need the texi sources) creates better html pages than anything you can get out of a man page. AFAICT, dwww uses info2html. Note too: with DocBook, you've got the option of splitting a document at major section breaks, or dumping it as One Big File®, depending on your SGML parsing arguments. Anyone know if Info's got a similar functionality? texi2html does, if you have the texi sources. Thanks. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.comhttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/Land of the free We freed Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html pgppFpMoRinUU.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: The Info v. Man War of 2001 (was Re: Where do you RTFM ?)
On Tuesday 25 December 2001 16:52 pm, Henrik Enberg wrote: But none of the current browsers I'm aware of has the index and searching facilities that info has. When I'm stuck with html documentation I'm always extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. Me too. And when I'm stuck with info documentation I am often extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. I don't think that is an info vs html issue. I think it is a problem not of the document format or protocol, but of the structure of the document itself. The problem is not the tool used to produce the document but the person producing the document. In defense of info I would say this: it predates html. AFAIK it was the first widely known or used hypertext documentation protocol. In criticism of info I would say this: it predates html. AFAICT it hasn't changed a bit. We have learned a quite a bit about hypertext since info was developed. Info was a marvel in its day, but it is IMHO simply obsolete. Now I'm not trying to defend html in particular, although well written html documentation can be very nice to read and quite intuitive to navigate. So too can info, for that matter. I would much prefer well written, well structured documentation in some more universal format, like docbook, which can produce output to suit the reader's preference. Those who prefer html or postscript or pdf or plain text or even info for that matter, can read the docs in the format they prefer. That's what I'd like to see. -- Bud Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] All things in moderation. And not too much moderation either.
Re: The Info v. Man War of 2001 (was Re: Where do you RTFM ?)
on Tue, Dec 25, 2001 at 05:28:56PM -0600, Bud Rogers ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: On Tuesday 25 December 2001 16:52 pm, Henrik Enberg wrote: But none of the current browsers I'm aware of has the index and searching facilities that info has. When I'm stuck with html documentation I'm always extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. Me too. And when I'm stuck with info documentation I am often extremely annoyed about how hard it is to find what I'm looking for. I don't think that is an info vs html issue. I think it is a problem not of the document format or protocol, but of the structure of the document itself. The problem is not the tool used to produce the document but the person producing the document. In defense of info I would say this: it predates html. Actually, they're very nearly coincident. The info changelog starts with a June 26, 1988 entry by RMS. Tim Berners-Lee's work on HTML and the World Wide Web started at CERN in 1988: In 1980 I played with programs to store information with random links, and in 1989, while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, I proposed that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be refered to by a single Universal Document Identifier. Given the go-ahead to experiment by my boss, Mike Sendall, I wrote in 1990 a program called WorlDwidEweb, a point and click hypertext editor which ran on the NeXT machine. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html Various concepts concerning hyperlinked texts have been kicked around since, depending on your perspective and definitions, the 1980s, 70s, 60s, or 50s, with the work of Marshal McLuhan and Vannevar Bush. By the mid-1980s, there was already a hypertext conference...and Jakob Nielsen was there: http://www.useit.com/papers/tripreports/ht87.html By that time, we'd already seen Ted Nelson's Xanadu proposal, the Apple Hypercard stack, work by Xerox (another blown PARC chance...), The Nielsen report makes for IMO interesting reading, it's a good historical referrent from just before the emergence of a number of systems we're currently discussing. Interesting is footnote 10, which refers to the getting lost problem. There are additional early / precursor days of the Web reports at: http://www.useit.com/papers/tripreports/ AFAIK it was the first widely known or used hypertext documentation protocol. Not quite, by 10-20 years depending on your reckoning. But one of the earlier implementations. In criticism of info I would say this: it predates html. Heh! AFAICT it hasn't changed a bit. We have learned a quite a bit about hypertext since info was developed. Info was a marvel in its day, but it is IMHO simply obsolete. Now I'm not trying to defend html in particular, although well written html documentation can be very nice to read and quite intuitive to navigate. So too can info, for that matter. I would much prefer well written, well structured documentation in some more universal format, like docbook, which can produce output to suit the reader's preference. Those who prefer html or postscript or pdf or plain text or even info for that matter, can read the docs in the format they prefer. That's what I'd like to see. Agreement. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.comhttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/Land of the free We freed Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html pgpVHF8J5nII0.pgp Description: PGP signature
