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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2014 01:10:19 -0500
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>
> Cc: Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden>, address@hidden
> 
> > Until there is a documentation viewer available in Elisp that is almost
> > as good as Info-mode while being prettier,
> 
> Does a web browser not qualify?

Not to me, not as progress from the current situation.

> If not, why not?

Because copy/pasting docs from a separate program while working on
something in Emacs is an annoyance -- it generally requires to reach
for the mouse, switch windows, etc.  And because some very useful
features, like "M-/", work well on stuff that is in an Emacs buffer,
but there are no comparable features for duplicating stiff in another
application.  And also because the index-searching commands, without
which you are lost in a large manual, don't exist in the Web browsers
out there.  And finally because Emacs documentation commands have
links that go to the respective manual and chapter, but no similar
features exist for external browsers.  (For the latter, you might
think these are easy to add, but that would need some not entirely
trivial solution for finding the place where the HTML docs are
installed on any given system.)

And I'm sure there are more reasons that people will come up with.

In sum, switching to a Web browser as the means to read documentation
is a regression.