Like other people here, I often write scripts and other tools for working with DEVONthink. I usually put those in GitHub repositories to make them freely available. When writing documentation about what they do, often I find myself wishing I could link to specific parts of the documentation that explains a relevant feature or capability. However, online, all I can find are the PDF and ePub formats (DEVONtechnologies | Handbooks and Extras).
Is there a version available in HTML format, by any chance? Maybe I missed something?
If not, I will open a ticket to request this. From a past posting by @eboehnisch from 2022, I gather the source form of the documentation is an XML format; depending on what that looks like, it may not be too difficult to write a converter to HTML. Even if only a subset of the docs are made available as web pages on devontechnologies.com, it would be useful. People would be able to link to the docs (in discussions here in this forum, from GitHub repos, etc.), and I have to believe that the additional visibility would help promote DEVONthink more widely, growing the user base.
This is not a new problem. People have solved this problem in practice.
Basic principles off the top of my head:
URLs for the latest version of the software should have a form without a version dependency. This is what users like me would normally use. Rough example:
The server should have redirections for things that are removed, so that most links will automatically go to the revised versions, or at least don’t give a 404.
This will take care of 99% of it.
For good measure, it would be easy to send the whole documentation site to the Internet Archive, so that if something really goes awry, one can try to find it in the Wayback Machine.
This has already been on our (long) to-do list for a long time. The versioned URLs are the way to go, of course, and keeping multiple versions of the help is no problem at all. We “just” need to find the time to polish the XML → HTML transformation so that it looks fine when embedded into our website.