A command to indicate a canonical web resource

[David Kastrup]

In a discussion in the Emacs developer list it came up that a frequent
process for many people using Info is

a) use the Info indexing commands and/or full text search or other
navigation to find some piece of information
b) cut and paste some recognizable sentence from the vicinity into a web
search engine
c) pick out a link in the search results in the official HTML online
documentation
d) check that link to lead to the write place
e) copy and paste it as a reference to some reply in a mailing list that
failed to find something in the documentation, either because of
searching unsuccessfully or not searching at all.

Obviously, converting to a link in the "official" documentation should
be better implemented as a single command in the Info reader.

However, to make that work reliably for unknown documents, the Info file
should likely contain a pointer to the root node of the online HTML
documentation.

Putting it there would entail some representation in the Info format,
and it would require a representation in Texinfo source as well.

It would seem like a good idea to me in the long run: pointing people to
the online documentation (and currently, that tends to be just HTML even
though having some non-local transport for straightforward Info might
also be an interesting option) is a frequent use of the local browsers.

This could even be applicable to locally installed HTML versions but I
don't know what user-level controls for this kind of "convert into web
link" a normal HTML browser would offer.

-- 
David Kastrup