More and better documentation is *definitely* something we need for
Maxima. It would be a pity, though, if any new documentation were not
available to all users, whatever platform/medium they are viewing it
through. Texinfo (or something like it) is a great solution, because it
can automatically be translated into HTML, TeX, Info, plaintext, etc. as
continuous or paginated output (for bedside reading), as hypertext (for
online reading), and as online information snippets (for online
reference).
I don't claim that Texinfo is perfect. For example, though it does have
a simple form of conditional text by output format -- so you can use
Plain Old Ascii (generated by Maxima's display2d engine) for plaintext,
MathML (or perhaps Plain Old Ascii as <pre>) for HTML, and TeX for TeX)
-- it doesn't seem to have a standard way of internationalizing -- but
you can use @ifset and @documentlanguage to keep the English, Greek,
Russian, and Spanish versions of a section all in the same place.
I agree that more sophisticated, interactive documentation would be
nice. But just remember that keeping two different documents in synch
is a pain.
-s