IBM has taken an interesting approach to documentation.
Back in the early 90's, the contracted to have an "info" pack
written which could search thru all of the IBM documentation tha
was on line for a phrase or word. Since all the documentaion was
in the format, the man command now use the info databases. Many
users were surprised to NOT see files in /usr/man.
Recently, (AIX 4.3.3) IBM converted all of there documentation to
html format. While that does require a browser to view the document, you
have the full hypertext capability of jumping from document to document.
Now, man just formats a page from the command reference and presents in
in a page format with no links available.
With this conversion, they wrote a cgi routine that can do the search
thru documents for a word or phase and order the probability that an
article meets your needs from 5 stars to 1 star.
Finally, since the search requires a server, most people access the
documentation thru a server so you can have the documentaion on one
machine and other machines can view it over the network or from a PC.
I would like to see the Linux documentation go this way. I am tired of
reading man pages and seeing "this document is no longer being maintained. For
more information see the info command".
Ingo Luetkebohle wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 01:59:20PM -0400, Alan Shutko wrote:
> > I just can't resist mentioning that info.el has been around since
> > 1985, and the standalone info has been around since 1987.
>
> Ok, and GML (the precursor to SGML, which in turn was precursor to
> XML) has been around since 1967 and was standardized as SGML in
> 1978. That only proves that good ideas can take a while to catch on,
> be it texinfo or generalized markup.
>
> However, my point was not to criticize texinfo in itself. I was trying
> to point that from an end-users perspective the perfectly good reasons
> that the GNU project might have had could be less understandable and
> that their *software* offering was not blessed with an intuitive user
> interface. "man"s interface, while simple, is intuitive :)
>
> Regards
--
Norman Levin
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