Re: Changes to Texinfo DTD

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:
> On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 09:41:39PM +0000, Nic Ferrier wrote:
>> 2. write an XSLT processor in Emacs Lisp. This wouldn't be as
>>    difficult as it sounds and I'm not sure it isn't done already (by
>>    one of the various XML/Emacs projects going on).
>
> The main question in my mind is whether this would be fast enough -- the
> current info mechanism, though it has its problems, can display info pages
> very quickly.  As a point of contrast, W3 is _very_ slow (I think it would be
> completely unsuitable for use in displaying info files).

The current info mechanism is very fast mostly because some formatting
is already done at info files generation time, where the most important
preformatting is the lines filling to 70 columns.  So, if it is
acceptable limitation, the same could be applied to XML solution,
i.e. to generate from Texinfo source such XML files that after
stripping all markup the remaining plain text is already properly
aligned without reformatting.  This will solve the current problem in
Info files, where some lines change their length after hiding a part
of reference.  In XML all additional information can be freely
included into tag attributes without affecting the filling of plain
text.  For example, <a xref="(elisp)Menu Keymaps">Menu Keymaps</a>.

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