Peter Schaffter <pe...@schaffter.ca>:
> Eric --
>
> On Fri, Mar 14, 2014, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > - Increased use of browsers shifts the commonest use cases for man pages
> > in a direction that rewards structural rather than presentational markup.
> >
>
> This is a tad OT, but do you know for a fact there's an increased
> use of browsers to read man pages?
Yes. As a paradigmatic example, the webbed version of the manual pages for
the git suite get a *lot* of traffic. (You can can tell this by their
Google rank.)
Now, to be fair, I suspect the git pages are an extreme case. But I
also suspect that they're an extreme case because the git maintainers
decided to put effort into (a) producing high-quality web versions,
(b) putting them in a well-known place, and (c) advertising them
as a feature.
If other projects did siimilarly I think they'd see similar results -
that is, lots of web traffic.
> I remember reading manpages in a browser for a while, back when it
> was cool that you could do it at all, but I quickly switched back
> to the terminal. Why? Because everything I ever wanted to consult
> a manpage for was something I'd be doing at the terminal. I won't
> bet the farm on it, but I'm pretty sure that's the case for most
> Unix users.
Here's what I think is going on. There are two different access cases
for man pages: directed and serendipitous.
In the directed case, you know the man page you want. You browse it locally,
through a terminal emulator or (if you're me) more often in an in an Emacs
buffer.
In the serendipitous case, you found the page via search engine. *That*
is when browser usage dominates.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
