MobI? Really?

[jfondren]

On Tuesday, 21 September 2021 at 16:14:52 UTC, Chris_D wrote:
> jfondren: Sorry, but I am talking about documentation.  For me, 
> online web pages don't qualify; they are in the cloud, unreal, 
> with no substance.  Does anyone really read 300 pages online, 
> in a web browser?  Of course not.

You can download them to a local copy, and you can generate them 
locally. But usually I am not reading 300 pages but going to a 
specific part of the documentation to look a specific thing up, 
and there I'm usually online anyway.

As a thing to read from beginning to end rather than a spot 
reference I think the current spec would be very wanting for a 
few reasons, like internal hyperlinks and little of the 
justificatory text that 'annotated' specifications tend to have. 
For a recent example, in https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html it 
just says "Do not misalign pointers if those pointers may point 
into the GC heap". Why not? If you can get away with it on a 
particular architecture, maybe it's fine? Actually, it's a big 
deal.

What I'd like is Perl's offline documentation. Just type 'perldoc 
perl' into a unix system and look at it. Or 'perldoc -f stat', 
'perldoc -q columns'.

> Jordi Sayol: PDF!  ePub!  Now that's what I call documentation!
>
> But that's on SourceForge.  My first port of call to learn 
> about D was, and is, dlang.org, where the *only* links to the 
> "D Programming Language Specification" in any downloadable 
> format are for the Mobi.
>
>   Chris

I haven't had consistent results with requesting updates to the 
online docs, but you could try just adding a link to this page. 
There are other offsite links and they occasionally need tending 
to, as well.

A more immediate place to make a change is 
https://wiki.dlang.org/The_D_Programming_Language , where it'd be 
very easily to slide a few extra links onto the 'D Language 
Specification' link at the top right.

The wiki isn't only accessible through Community/Wiki; several of 
the Resources links on dlang.org also point to it.