On 2014-11-16, at 15:43, Robin Vowels wrote:
>
> HTML isn't something that a manual should be in.
> It almost never prints properly (prints half-lines etc), doesn't have
> organised
> page numbers or index, etc etc.
>
Line lengths and page numbers are matters of presentation, not
semantics. Tim Berners-Lee et al. invented HTML for semantic
markup. Through decades it has been perverted to a presentation
bias by those who misguidedly value form over content.
Indices, TOCs, and cross-references are quite practical in HTML.
They must contain hyperlinks to topics, not page nmbers. Many
(yet too few) HTML pages allow the viewer to re-flow text simply
by resizing a viewer window. Where suitable, such as
<PRE>program code</PRE> exist.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a
Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you
had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer,
another word processor, or another network."
-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
There would probably be value in a renderer from HTML (semantic-oriented)
to hardcopy (perhaps via PDF), adding page numbers to ToCs, etc. But
printing a manual is *so* 20th Century.
-- gil
