man vs info vs texinfo files

[Per Bothner]

On 03/06/2009 07:54 AM, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 01:03:34AM -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
>> On 03/06/2009 12:26 AM, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:
>>> Are we then going to require people to use elinks or w3m to view them,
>> No.  I guess I wasn't clear.  I was suggesting that one possibility
>> is to use elinks or w3m *automatically* as backends for the
>> info program or info mode:
>
> I hope that nobody will take that seriously.  Search and navigation
> in html variants of documentation are between poor and non-existent.
> A search within just displayed fragment is not coming even close.

Here I'm talking about changing file formats by the info program
from info format to xhtml, as generated by makeinfo.  That xhtml
has all the information that the info-formatted version has (or if
not it would be easy to tweak makeinfo).

By by definition, any searching that the standalone info program
can currently do on info-formatted files a version of the info program
modified to be able to read xhtml files would also be able to do.

Now it might be a lot of work to re-implement info functionality
when using a different file-format, and it might be hard to find
someone to do that work.  It would probably be a lot easier to
modify the info program to run makeinfo when needed.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per at bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/