Re: Correspondence between web-pages and Info-pages

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Kelly Dean" <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 11:17:45 +0000
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> Web browsers have some useful navagation features:
> 0. An address bar, which shows the name of the currently displayed page.
> 1. A drop-down menu that shows the sequence of visited pages for the current 
> buffer, and the current position within that sequence.
> 2. In the address bar, you can enter a new name and press enter to open that 
> page.
> 3. The name shown is the same string as the string you enter to open the page 
> by name.
> 4. You can copy the name that's shown.
> 5 Because of the preceding three features, you can save the name into a text 
> file that you use as a list of bookmarks, paste the name back into the 
> address 
> bar to return to the page, and use the name to cite the page so your readers 
> can open it; IOW, you can use the name to link to the page.
> 6. The name can include a hash mark and section name at the end, so that when 
> you open the page, the browser jumps to the named section.

> Emacs's Info browser has feature #0, but lacks the rest.

Not really, see below (and your own conclusions are different as well).

> Emacs's Info-history 
> command partially provides #1, but doesn't show the actual link sequence 
> that's 
> traversed by Info-history-back and Info-history-forward.

This doesn't sound like "Emacs lacks" the feature.  It's not even
partial.  It is just different from what you'd like it to be.

> Instead of #2, Emacs 
> makes you remember a command («g», for Info-goto-node) for entering the name 
> of 
> the page to open.

You can use the menu bar if you don't remember the command.

> Regarding #3, for example, I'm currently viewing the page 
> with the shown name ⌜(elisp)Top > Keymaps > Translation Keymaps⌝[0], but 
> that's 
> effectively like an HTML page title; it isn't the name used for opening the 
> page.

You can disable the "breadcrumbs" display by toggling an option, if
you don't like it.  But note that they are clickable, so they provide
yet another navigation aid, one that Web browsers generally lack.

> ([0]: I actually had to manually transcribe that name, because incredibly, 
> Emacs lacks feature #4. See bug #19471.)

Emacs doesn't lack that: you can copy the current node name to the
kill ring (and consequently to the clipboard) using the
Info-copy-current-node-name command.  This enables #5.

> For non-English manuals, there's no need to embed the language name in the 
> URL; 
> just use the source-ip address of the request to choose which version to 
> serve, 
> like Google does. (Just checking if anybody is still awake.)

YMMV, but I'm always tremendously annoyed by Google oh-so-helpful
decision what language I want to see my pages in.  I hope Emacs will
never follow that particular suit.