Re: Ada Reference Manual 2012 in info format

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Jerrid Kimball" <jerrid@kimball.co> wrote in message 
news:jnu7u0$16o$1@munin.nbi.dk...
> On 04/30/2012 10:19 PM, Randy Brukardt wrote:
...
>> I suppose some people need to have a pile of eye-candy before they're
>> willing to use anything. Sad.
>
> It's really much more than that.  With a community of sites that generally 
> look like Ada Home, no casual developer is going to stick around.  When 
> the impression is that something is dead or near death who wants to invest 
> any time, money or energy in it?

AdaHome, of course, is dead and has been for 15 years. If people look at 
dead sites first, surely they *are* going to have a problem that way. (I'm 
not sure why it even stays on the 'net).

>  As a whole, we give this impression.  It's not necessarily our faults 
> being left-brained and all, but at some point not presenting a modern face 
> to the world at large hurts us as a whole.  AdaIC for example has done a 
> decent job updating its appearance.

You're probably right; the superficial is far more important these days than 
any substance (of which there is precious little). In all seriousness, this 
is not a world that I care to inhabit. Ada has tended to be the rare 
exception to that.

>> For the record, the design of the Ada Standard HTML had two main 
>> criteria:
>> (1) Look as similar to the PDF as possible; and (2) use only basic HTML 4 
>> so
>> that works on as many devices and browsers as possible. Those goals 
>> prevent
>> the use of any significant eye-candy. (So does the desire to have these
>> things work for people who insist on safe browsing - no scripts, no 
>> flash,
>> no crap.)
> >
> These are all noble goals, but I think they're silly in today's 
> environment.  I think expecting a PDF to look like a webpage or vice versa 
> (cue eye rolling).

The PDF (and the printed page) for the Ada Reference Manual is very readable 
and a great way to impart the information. The navigation is admittedly, 
terrible. The reason that I lobbied for the HTML version in the first place 
was to get that extra navigation (the HTML links the index, the syntax, and 
the cross-references). But there is no reason whatsoever to lose the 
readability of the original just to get extra navigation.

I can see efforts to further improve the navigation and presentation in 
narrow ways (in particular, preventing really long lines on wide screens). 
But the entire point of the ARM is to present information concisely -- too 
much eye candy is going to detract a lot from that (just as it does on the 
new AdaIC website).

>  Today's web looks a lot different than it did in 1995 and there's a point 
> where you just have to say fuck it and leave those old devices in their 
> own filth.

Yeah, most sites are hardly useable unless you allow them to show you 
malware-laden ads and run god-knows-what on your computer. It's all change 
for the sake of change; there's no benefit to most of it, and it wastes 
everyone's time -- they could have been building something useful to 
humanity, but instead they're fiddling with colors and fonts. (And those big 
corporations want it that way -- much less likely that you'll come up with 
something truely disruptive that they can't copy.)

>We have to get it together as a *brand* and quit being curmudgeonly 
>engineers all the time and proselytize by not looking like a heap of 
>fossils.

We're not going to get together around that. I *am* a fossil and proud of 
it. I much prefer using things that work rather than changing them just for 
the sake of change. Yes, I much prefer the look of Windows 2000 to any of 
the later versions -- in large part because the changes brought almost no 
improvement in usability. (For that, a disruptive change, like moving to the 
touch interfaces of modern phones, is needed. Incremental improvements are 
OK only if they are completely compatible, something almost every software 
developer seems to forget.)

That isn't to say that change is necessarily bad, but it has to have *clear* 
benefits for the time (relearning in particular) and money investment. The 
vast majority doesn't have that, and a lot of a obvious step backwards 
(where important functionality disappears - much like Microsoft deciding 
that we don't need a Start Menu in Windows 8 -- I almost exclusively use the 
Start Menu to launch GUI programs, I never, ever use the desktop to launch 
programs, occassionally by double-clicking on a file (but that's rather 
rare).

Enough ranting.

If you do spend time making an alternative version of the Standard, I 
strongly recommend that you do so by modifying the ARM_Formatter tool. That 
way, you can convert future versions of the Standard to your format easily 
(if it is a by-hand conversion, it will become obsolete far quicker than you 
realize and then you'll either have to do it all again or forget it). And 
that would also allow the alternate version to be used on the Rationale and 
other standards documents, if that is appropriate someday. (That's what 
Stephen Leake did with the "info" version.)

                                              Randy.