[MPlayer-DOCS] manpage and HTML docs - FFmpeg MPEG-4 vs. DivX

[The Wanderer]

Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:

> On Tuesday, 23 November 2004 at 22:24, The Wanderer wrote:
> 
>> [...] Part of the problem in this respect is that the FAQ, like
>> much of the rest of the documentation, is no longer directly
>> available in a format which (TTBOMK) can readily be directly 
>> rendered and thus viewed by near-omnipresent software; there would
>> have been much less of an issue back before the change from HTML to
>> XML.
> 
> This is true only for CVS snapshots. If you're using CVS, you should
> know how to (or at least how to find out how to) build HTML docs from
> XML.

Acknowledged. I do, in fact, know how to do that, but I do not do so on
a routine basis, and that usually means that the documentation I have
handy is out of date - and that, as I indicated, means I'm less likely
to actually use it. The question is one of ready accessibility. (The
problem would be less present if the HTML docs were automatically
updated on make, if the XML docs had changed - but that might introduce
unnecessary delays in compilation, and not everybody cares that much
about the *ML docs anyway.)

Since we were talking about uninformed users, however, your point does
in fact remain. (...except that a common response to almost any bug
report is "use the CVS version", which could easily result in a user who
does not know how to build the HTML docs running CVS... but oh well.)

-- 
       The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.