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

[Filipp Gunbin]

On 08/12/2014 14:21 +0000, Tom wrote:

> Filipp Gunbin writes:
>> 
>> You write about a "pre-Web mindset".  But what is a proper "Web-midset",
>> then?  I see my colleagues googling nearly everything while they can
>> access most of it locally (like Javadocs - I'm a Java developer). 
>
> I often use google to lookup something which I also have locally,because
> usually it is much faster. Even for emacs docs. Google does word stemming
> and alternatives, so if you search for something related "modification"
> then google also finds matches with "changing", "altering", etc.
>
> So if you don't know the exact wording of what you are looking for
> then google is faster most of the time.
>
> Info, for example, cannot do this, so it is faster only if you already
> know what you are looking for, you know the exact term, etc. In other
> cases, when looking up something new and unfamiliar in the docs, using
> Google is usually more efficient.

But why not actually _know_ what you're looking for?  That's why I
prefer navigation over search and look at the TOC first before opening
some node.  This way you get the information in context and it helps to
better understand the topic in the long term, but of course slows down
the immediate access time.  But for that we have `describe-key',
`describe-function' etc.

Filipp