[haiku] Re: BePDF documentation

  • From: "Alan Burkes" <firstakir@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:09:57 -0800

For the mere reason of avoiding more bad jokes and random off-topic
banter, lets return to the subject, eh?

HTML is the perfect form for documentation. One program will
doubtlessly need to reference another, so hyperlinks are crucial, and
almost every OS from 1990 on has had hyperlinked documentation; DOS
had it's funny HELP program, while the Amiga had it with Amigaguide,
and Mac had .... a big heavy printed manual. But their OS was crap
anyways. :P

But the great thing about HTML is how extensible it is. If we add some
extra tags to the a element, we can make a link which points to
documentation not currently on the system look it up online and
retrieve it, or a document could use our lightning fast search
function to find the program it's documenting, and display its version
information. Note that no other format has this kind of extensibility
(besides, perhaps, ODF, but we're not having a very good time just
making it run as it is, so modifying it is out of the question). These
are things that I think Be would do if they were still around, and
having these features fits well with the BeOS philosophy.

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