Re: Failing to see the allure of Emacs

[David Kastrup]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 2:24 PM, akaiser@visi.com <akaiser@visi.com> wrote:
>>> For someone who gloats about his own documentation successes
>>> which I'm not motivated to track down you have marvellously
>>> bad communication skills to get your point across.
>>
>> Noted, Tim, and thanks so much for the help and understanding.
>
>
> There are sure glitches in the manual. It is a live document
> continously beeing worked on. You can of course contribute on the same
> term as anyone else. This mean you must be more specific, using
> examples.
>
> Regarding using info I think it works very well. In the beginning I
> thought html documentation would be better, but I have changed my
> mind.

That's comparing apples and oranges.  Emacs' info reader is a great
application, and HTML is a file format.  It certainly would be feasible
to let Emacs info read HTML files (probably a subset of HTML tailored
for info).  At the time info was written, HTML was not yet around the
corner.

For the end user, it counts that Emacs info is great.  It could be
similarly great if the underlying file format were HTML (after all, the
end user never gets to see it).

It just happens that it isn't.  And nobody went to the pain to move info
to HTML since, after all, the end user never gets to see it.

-- 
David Kastrup