Re: Have you all gone crazy? Was: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Paul Eggert]

Drew Adams wrote:
> You can do both: file bug reports and search the Internet.

Sure, but there are good reasons that searching is way more popular than filing 
bug reports.  Although traditional indexed manuals needn't be discarded if 
already written, other ways of navigating through Emacs are increasingly 
cost-effective, and this suggests that we should shift some of our limited 
development resources away from the tedium of writing and indexing the manuals. 
 This shifting is already happening, and it's something we should welcome 
rather than decry.

Composite glyphs are admittedly a poorly-documented topic in the Emacs manuals, 
so here's an example using a well-documented topic.  Let's say I want the time 
of day in Emacs.  If I visit the Elisp manual in info mode and type 'i time of 
day RET' Emacs responds "No `timestamp of day' in index" (there's that ugly 
1980s-style quoting again!) and fails, even though there's a perfectly good 
section called "Time of Day" in the Elisp manual -- what's up with that and why 
did Emacs insist on changing "time" to "timestamp" and then getting lost?

In contrast, the Google search 'Emacs "time of day"' yields a first hit that's 
precisely what's needed.

This was the very first example I tried while writing this email -- it's not a 
contrived example.  I hope it helps to explain why search engines are far more 
popular for this sort of thing.  It's not merely that users know search engines 
better than they know Emacs info mode.  It's that the search engines are 
typically better for most users.