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

[David Kastrup]

Christopher Allan Webber <address@hidden> writes:

> Eric S. Raymond writes:
>
>> Karl Fogel <address@hidden>:
>>> Actually, I think that might be *more* important than the exact choice
>>> of markup language.  I hope we don't bikeshed.com the choice of markup
>>> language to death.  ${ANYTHING_STANDARD_OR_ORG} is fine by me.
>>
>> Agreed.  I may have given the impression that I'm more attached to
>> asciidoc per se than I am. It would be my first choice, but a reasoned
>> case could be made for a couple of the others.
>
> Okay, sorry also that I may be responding to that a bit more than
> anything.  Getting GNU's web documentation improved is an important
> issue to me, and I really do want this to happen.
>
> I do agree that the importance of good web documentation is more
> important than info support, and if somehow we got tossed into the fork
> of needing to pick one or the other, I think nice looking web
> documentation is more important to the long-term health of GNU.

So tell me what you consider wrong with the Texinfo-generated web
documentation of GNU LilyPond, arbitrary stuff like
<URL:http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/guitar>.
What parts of the documentation are "not nice looking" to a degree that
would be bad for LilyPond's long-term health?

I might add that we have several translations of all the web pages and
manuals which are tightly maintained (and some that are basically in
some left-behind state, not because of the amount of work Texinfo
presents since translators do not even need to touch the Texinfo parts
and, in contrast to some magic-cookie markup system like AsciiDoc are
not likely to break stuff just by copying things) but rather the amount
of work a good translation actually is.  Most of our translators (and
documentation-focused developers) come from a Windows background and/or
do not contribute significantly to code.

And that's certainly less technically inclined than the demographic
expected to write Emacs manuals.

-- 
David Kastrup