Re: [OFFTOPIC] Info files vs Man pages

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot com>]

>   > Personally I think that a html version of docs is certainly a
>   > *better* choice then the "info" file format.  What would be the
>   > correct way to get html-ized docs the prefered format for GNU
>   > packages?
> You'd have to bring this up with RMS.  This isn't a decision that the
> egcs project can make for the GNU world.

You can already have HTML documents.  The GNU format is Texinfo, not
info, and it can be converted into decent HTML.  HTML is a bad "source
language" (meaning, a language to write an original document in) because
too much manual labor is required (for cross-references, tables of
contents, and such), but it's a good language to generate from other
forms.

Furthermore, Texinfo has been extended (in the latest version) to add HTML
features, link links to other URLs.

>   > Is it an option to start to include the egcs docs as html?
> We could probably make it an additional option if someone contributes
> the code.  

texi2html already exists.  All that's needed is Makefile stuff to
build the HTML forms of the documents, plus conventions for defining
where the documents are stored.  One possibility is $prefix/html.

The other issue is that texi2html gives multiple choices as to how
the generated document is split into separate files: you can split
by nodes, split by chapters, or generate one big file (in all cases
the table of contents is a separate file).