From: David Kastrup Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 10:20:32 GMT Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] GIT 1.5.3-rc4 Message-ID: <851weib7v3.fsf@lola.goethe.zz> In-Reply-To: <20070805095928.GA15949@coredump.intra.peff.net> Jeff King writes: > On Sun, Aug 05, 2007 at 11:54:51AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote: > >> >> (info "(gcc) Extended Asm") >> >> >> >> and when you are reading mail in Emacs, you can click on that line >> >> and get to the respective page in a manual comprising hundreds of >> >> pages. >> > >> > Ugh. A documentation referencing system that works only in one >> > particular editor, >> >> That works in readers of the info format. Do HTML references work >> outside of HTML readers? > > I'm not talking about the _format_, I'm talking about the _referencing > system_. In other words, because URLs are a standard, there are > thousands of programs which recognize them and can find the resource > they mention (which in turn, may spawn an info reader, an html reader, > or some other interpreter). Well, just for kicks I let firefox loose on info:gcc#Extended Asm It passed this off to the GNOME help browser, which displayed "Loading...", used up 4 seconds of CPU time and 100M of memory, and then hanged itself with a spinning cursor. Interesting. Starting the help browser manually and typing the URL in, however, works. It just seems to suicide when firefox tells it about URLs. > What software is going to recognize (info "(gcc) Extended Asm") in > your email and realize that it's a reference to another document? > None, except emacs. Sure. So use the above syntax. > Though I don't especially like the info format or readers, my > argument here isn't against it. It is against the feature you > mentioned being a substantial benefit, since a large part of the > world isn't reading their email in emacs. So write it as a URL, if you want to. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum