Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Stefan Monnier]

>       Also, the above made me curious of what exact features of the
>       HTML presentation are felt missing in Info?  (In relation to GNU
>       documentation, anyway.)

The main issue with the Info format is that it's not designed to be
parsed.  Even the tiny bit of parsing that's expected (i.e. find menu
entries and hyperlinks) is not very well designed (e.g. restrictions on
the kind of characters that appear in a menu entry).

So we can present it "as is" in plain-text as was done back in Emacs-19,
but it's difficult to prettify the various elements in a reliable way.
We do try to do it (e.g. hide some of the verbosity of the hyperlink's
syntax, use different fonts for different elements), but this is
inevitably very limited because it's all done heuristically: e.g. the
Info format does not tell us which part of the text is "text" and which
part of the text is "quoted code", so we can't refill (which would
sometimes be needed after hiding the hyperlink syntax) and we can't use
proportional fonts for the text part since that would mess up the code
example parts.


        Stefan