In defense of HTML

[David Cary <d.cary@ieee.org>]

I was just thinking, "I wonder if it's possible to using HTML and lynx (or
Netscape) as a replacement/improvement for "man pages" (and Xman) and
"info" (and TKinfo)".

I want people to see "pretty", easy-to-read help pages when they have a
question (using, say, Netscape or Opera or
  Project Mnemonic
  http://oloon.student.utwente.nl/~mnemonic/
). But when the GUI isn't working (i.e., when they really *need* the help
pages), I want them to still be able to access the information (using lynx).

Man pages were nice; but they can't hyperlink (among other things).
I still haven't figured out "info".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but man pages and "info" can both be simulated by
HTML pages -- conversion to HTML loses no information.

Some people say that HTML prints out ugly.

One thing I find interesting about HTML is it deliberately seperates
content from presentation.

If someone says that it prints out ugly, that seems to be a presentation
issue. Surely the words themselves do not need to change to make it print
out nicer ? If you find some way of laying out words that makes them easier
to understand than the default way, that's *great* -- code it up, or
describe it to me and let me code it up, and now *all* (past present and
future) our HTML pages get better-looking, not just the ones you manually
converted to a "superior format".

(OK, so the same can be said about TeX. But there is no text-mode program
that lets me read TeX documentation that is as good as lynx is for HTML, is
there ?)

Even so, "ugly" HTML is still an improvement over printing raw ASCII "man"
pages.

Still, this xhelp looks like a good idea -- access the documentation in
whatever format the programmer put it in (man pages, HOWTOs, etc.).

>Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 01:51:10 -0500 (EST)
>From: Paul Anderson <paul@geeky1.ebtech.net>
>To: David Cary <d.cary@ieee.org>
>cc: seul-project@seul.org
>Subject: Re: SEUL: Is it too soon for me to comment?
...
>> I fail to see why documentation isn't just put into HTML and let us run
>> Lynx on it, or any other browser. If HTML can store the sum total of human
>> knowledge, then it should be almost good enough for Linux documentation.
>>
>As far as typesetting languages go, HTML is braindead.  Compare HTML to
>TeX, LaTeX, Lout, groff, postscript, and you realize that HTML is that
>visual basic of text formatting languages.  And for printing, -*GAG*- is
>it UGLY!  There's no way a web page can beat a nice dvi.
...
>                        Paul Anderson
...
>          http://www.netcom.com/~tonyh3/speck.html

--
+ David Cary "mailto:d.cary@ieee.org" "http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/"
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