Re: Divergence in menu appearance between Emacs Info and standalone Info

[Robert J. Chassell]

   In lynx, press '=' and you will see what's up with the link ....

That tells me the information, but as far as I know, no one has
written a regular expression search tool that figures out whether the
link is to another section within the same document, and if so, runs a
search in it.

In other words, I want to navigate via a regexp search through all and
only those files that are part of the `same document'.

Have I missed something?  Does the Lynx `/' command do what I want?
(I just tried it, and it does not seem to.)

   ... if you are interested in remote files, either make use of a
   search engine or install an http index tool like htdig ....

That is the solution I use, and it is broken!  That is the point.  By
default, you must either use a search engine or create one, like
htdig.

Perhaps it is possible to write a regexp search function that reads
the LINK info and figures out from it whether the cross reference
goes to a continuation of the same document or not.  

That would be great, if it is possible.  (The task is beyond me.)
Certainly, you can download all the pages for a site; that is done,
for example, by `wget' with mirroring.  That is fine for a small site
devoted to one topic.  My problem is that I cannot figure out how to
avoid pages on a site that are not part of the document in question
and which I do not want to download.

Perhaps an initial scheme would be just to search within pages in
subdirectories of the current page:

Thus a search through `http://www.gnu.org/gnu/' would go through its
sup-pages, which might mean downloading all 13 of them, over 210
kilobytes.  But it would have to do this without doing what `wget -m'
just tried to do, which is go to a page outside the
`http://www.gnu.org/gnu/' directory, and also, to avoid downloading
non-searchable files.

If someone did this and it worked well, and the feature got
incorporated into Galeon or other graphical Web browser as well as
Lynx and Emacs W3 mode, then it might completely change the Web!
People could navigate and read much more easily than they do now.

Moreover, with working next, previous, and up bindings, HTML could
become a competitor to Texinfo as a deep representation medium.

   It's simply impossible to store _all_ docs locally.

No, it is not possible.  But when you view a page using HTML, you
download that page.  The idea is to download the other pages in a book
as needed (not all the pages on a site, because that could be too
many), and to enable searches through them.  

Ideally, of course, you only download the page that your regular
expression search found; but I cannot see how to ensure that Web sites
provide the right tools -- after all, even now, not every one of them
provides for an htdig binding or text entry box on every page.

(Does htdig provide a mechanism for remote keybinding in some Web
browsers?  As far as I know, it doesn't for Emacs W3M mode, for Lynx,
or for Galeon.  But maybe I have missed something.  Is there a Web
browser or Emacs mode I can use such that when I visit the
`http://www.gnu.org/gnu/' or `http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/' Web
pages, I can type `C-s' or an equivalent and get an htdig search?  It
should be pretty obvious that you are better off than reading
typewritten sheets when you can type a string into a form, as the
built in Galeon find command requires, or as htdig requires, but that
`M-x' (Info-search) is a generation ahead.)


   >     I don't see how hiding node names could be a step in the wrong
   >     direction.
   >
   > Because node names tell you where a file is located.

   This isn't always true.  ... glancing at the node name does not
   tell me whether it's under /usr/share/info or /gnu/share/info ...

You are right.  That is the case for a default configuration.

However, I have my mode line set to tell me the full path name of any
info document -- to do automatically what you do by calling C-x C-f
(or a similar command).  (I cannot understand why so many people like
the default configuration; to me it is as if they decided to be like
horses who pull carriages and wear blinders over their eyes.)

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         Rattlesnake Enterprises
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.teak.cc                             address@hidden