Re: Enhancements to options menu (was Re: Reveal mode)

[Robert J. Chassell]

   ... Perhaps HTML isn't the best format, ...

As a documentation format, HTML is broken intrinsically.  HTML does
not distinguish between references to another document somewhere else
on the Internet and references to another part of the same document.

This means that you cannot design a program to search conveniently
through an HTML document that consists of more than one Web page.

Info, on the other hand, lets you navigate very conveniently through
a document using a regexp search.  It is still, after more than 15
years, the single most efficient on-line documentation format in
existence, surprising as that is, and all because you can undertake a
regexp search within the document.

You could design a special format for writing an HTML document that
enables you to navigate conveniently through a document.  This would be
an add-on to HTML.  

HTML's built-in failure was designed as a feature:  it was based on
the assumption that you would never create a document more than one
Web page long; and that that document should be able to link to any
other document on the World Wide Web.

   But what about DocBook?

You can create Info documents from DocBook; thus you gain efficient
navigation, which you lose when you convert the same document to HTML.

However, people who write in DocBook often fail to consider the
various output formats that are available.  For example, they may not
consider writing for a person who is driving a car and listening to
their work.  The authors tend to write as if every reader will *look*
at the page.  This is not a problem of the format, but of the
sociology of the document writing process.

A very good rule of thumb:  write your document so that a blind person
can follow it easily.  Then, even if no blind person ever reads it,
the document will be easily followed by a sighted person who is
looking at the document.  (Incidentally, this rule of thumb also
applies to Web page design.)

When you figure out how to show images in an Emacs session running
over a fast local network with a windowing system, please also, at the
same time, figure out how to show the same document to someone running
in a character-only mode over a slow network (my recent experience has
taken me below 300 baud), and at the same time, figure out how to
present the same document to someone who is `situationally blind'
while driving a car, or permanently blind.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                  address@hidden
    Rattlesnake Enterprises             http://www.rattlesnake.com