Peter Hercek
Jon Fairbairn wrote:
A hyperlink of the form <a href="http://.../long-research-paper.html#interesting-paragraph"> interesting bit</a> is far more useful than one of the form <a href="http://.../long-research-paper.pdf">look for section 49.7.3</a>. It may not seem significant, but when one is attempting to learn some new part of Haskell it's really off-putting.
Pdfs are not that bad.
No, they (or at least links to them) typically are that bad! Mind you, as far as fragment identification is concerned, so are a lot of html pages. But even if the links do have fragment ids, pdfs still impose a significant overhead: I don't want stuff swapped out just so that I can run a pdf viewer; a web browser uses up enough resources as it is. And will Hoogle link into pdfs?
The above definitely works OK on windows, not sure about linux pdf viewers.
Works perfectly on my Fedora 7 systems. While this would be a definite improvement over having to search through the pdf, the delay and the fact that pdfs aren't as good as html for on-line viewing are still enough of an overhead that it's discouraging. If I'm using PHP (an execrable language), I can type the name (or something like the name) of any function into the search box on the PHP manual webpage and get useful (albeit often extremely irritating from a Haskell programmer's point of view) results straight back. Even including my language designer's distaste for PHP, this can make writing a wee bit of PHP a less onerous event than writing the same thing in Haskell -- definitely not what we want! -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk