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Subjectinfo format (was Re: Linux 2.2.11pre4)
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torvalds> The "info" interface makes sense only to people who grok GNU
torvalds> emacs,

I do not get it. There is a number of different info readers around,
with different interfaces. In particular both KDE and Gnome have
one included (integrated with another stuff). I do not see why
somebody who thinks that a "better" interface could be used will not
simply write one. If it will be really better then it will be
used all over the place and there will be no problem.

torvalds> and if you actually want to be user-friendly you either
torvalds> use "man" (because that's how everything else is documented and
torvalds> then you could actually just tell people to use man everywhere)

This is somewhat ridiculous for documents with sizes of a few hundreds
pages (and your disk is likely full of such documents). This was tried
with Perl4, for example, and results were not very friendly.
A 'manpage' around 10 printed pages in size is already pushing, IMO.

torvalds> or you use HTML (because that's a _useful_ format that even
torvalds> non-emacsheads can understand).

Actually 'info' is a hypertext format which predates HTML by years and,
if you look a bit closer, is **much** better suited for most of a computer
documentation than HTML which really has a different purpose in life;
grepping through HTML is not a very nice experience most of the time,
for example. There are other advantages as well. Moreover nobody writes
'info' files by hand but they are generated from 'texinfo' sources
which have converters to few other formats, including printed books,
and there was somewhere 'texi2html' as well. As for reader interfaces -
once again, nothing in the format dictates how they should look like.

Michal

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