From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry) Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.texinfo.pretest,gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: A new online publishing tool for Texinfo documents. Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 16:18:03 -0500 Sender: texinfo-pretest-bounces@texinfo.org Message-ID: <200311222118.hAMLI3v07843@f7.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1069535893 32664 80.91.224.253 (22 Nov 2003 21:18:13 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 21:18:13 +0000 (UTC) Cc: epameinondas@gmx.de Original-X-From: texinfo-pretest-bounces@texinfo.org Sat Nov 22 22:18:10 2003 Return-path: Original-Received: from consort.superb.net ([209.61.216.22] helo=f7.net) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1ANf8r-0005vv-00 for ; Sat, 22 Nov 2003 22:18:10 +0100 Original-Received: from consort.superb.net (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by f7.net (8.11.7-20030920/8.11.7) with ESMTP id hAMLI6e07851; Sat, 22 Nov 2003 16:18:06 -0500 Original-Received: (from karl@localhost) by f7.net (8.11.7-20030920/8.11.7) id hAMLI3v07843; Sat, 22 Nov 2003 16:18:03 -0500 Original-To: nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk Original-cc: bob@rattlesnake.com Original-cc: texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org Original-cc: juri@jurta.org Original-cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-BeenThere: texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Texinfo development and discussion. List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: texinfo-pretest-bounces@texinfo.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.comp.tex.texinfo.pretest:1150 gmane.emacs.devel:18029 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel:18029 Hi Nic, Bob, all, This message has been sent to all interested parties. Well, not quite. You missed everyone else interested in Texinfo :). I've included texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org now. (I also forwarded your message there so the others will have the background.) Overall, I like the plan very much. As you may already know (perhaps it was the impetus for this?), there was a long thread on emacs-devel recently about approaching this from the other direction: extending Info format to carry more markup information, so that Emacs could do a better job rendering it (the original hope was to have a way to colorize certain parts of the Info files). At that time, I stated (and still believe) that starting with the makeinfo XML output would be much better and easier than turning Info format into some kind of ersatz XML/HTML. So I'm very happy to see this proposal :). Here are other comments. alter makeinfo --xml so that it splits the XML by Texinfo I am no xml expert, but I'm not sure that is necessary or desirable, since the only thing that will read the XML is other scripts. It is the specialized HTML that needs to be split. And even then, split nodes are just one possible outcome. There are xref issues here, which Patrice Dumas and I have hashed over at some length. Anyway, all that is a technical detail. In any case, you should know that Alper Ersoy (who's on texinfo-pretest) has been doing great work with makeinfo in the last few weeks, especially the XML, Docbook, and HTML output. I'm sure he will have some comments. Alper has also worked a lot with the XML output for purposes of the GTK documentation system. Maybe some of that can be reused. I personally don't think this will deprecate the existing HTML output from makeinfo because that has good support for ALL browsers. And doesn't require any server-side support. Emacs/W3 and Lynx do not support Javascript so we will have to find another way of binding actions to keys within the HTML pages downloaded to those browsers. Presumably it is possible to do anything in Emacs :). In any case, Emacs/W3 may not the best approach for Emacs support. But that's up to the emacs developers, of course. As for lynx, I do not know; I haven't tried the version of links you mention. JavaScript is the only standard way to do browser-side programming that I know of. It may turn out that only a small subset of JavaScript is actually needed for the job, that wouldn't be as painful to add to Emacs and Lynx as the whole huge mess. Thanks, karl _______________________________________________ Texinfo home page: http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/ texinfo-pretest@texinfo.org http://ff0.org/mailman/listinfo/texinfo-pretest