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Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:33:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Fred Floberg <ffloberg@snet.net>
To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
Subject: Re: New call.html
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On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Kevin Duffey wrote:

> But..dont you need Postscript drivers? Why not just HTML? Seems most
> everybody has a web browser these days. Are you talking about the
> downloadable document, or the one displayed on the web site? Obviously the
> one on the web site is HTML, but HTML is easy enough to use any web browser
> to view it, and you can "decent" formatting with it.

This is a bit off the current topic, as you're talking about The Call to
Vendors, rather than the ALSA API and Driver Coding docs, but I thought I'd
take the opportunity to express my views on docs in general...

While I would never suggest that the docs be restricted to one format or the
other, I _would_ hope that an HTML version be maintained.

At this point, ALSA is changing very rapidly, and hence, so is the
documentation. If viewing the docs required printing (and let's face
it, using ghostview, et al, to flip through docs is clumsy at best, compaired
to HTML viewers) then we'd have to re-print each new doc revision, which
amounts to quite a waist of paper and toner (and time).

Also, HTML has the advantage of hyperlinks, which if used judiciously,
can make cross referencing much more convenient. I always leave netscape running
with bookmarks to local copies of docs and it flattens out my learning curve
quite substantially.

Postscript formatted docs will be good once ALSA has settled down (not in the
foreseeable future), I suspect, but paper docs will never be able to match well
written HTML, IMHO.

Fred



