Re: Alternative input formats

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > But getting this within Emacs, for "full HTML" sounds pretty difficult,
 > both because of limitations of Emacs's redisplay code, and because "full
 > HTML" nowadays goes much beyond the SGML markup language and includes
 > Javascript along with a large runtime library.
 > 
 > So it would necessarily have to be limited to a specific subset of
 > HTML.

How about calling the subset "InfoML, the Info-featured HTML subset"?
It would also need to spec a CSS subset, I think (see below).

I don't think anybody has asked for "full HTML" (and definitely not
"full HTML5", although some HTML5 features might be nice).  Certainly
the necessary navigation features are easy to implement in Emacs Lisp.
The Emacs Lisp InfoML browser can provide them natively, and ignore
the Ecmascript functions that conventional browsers would probably use
to support navigation.

Other than that we need faces, and I would suggest prohibiting EM (and
I!) and STRONG (ditto B!) elements in favor of semantic markup on DIV
and SPAN elements ('class="nextNode"' and the like).  Then the
conventional browsers would get appropriate CSS.  Again, the Emacs
Lisp InfoML browser can ignore the CSS, at least at first.

And links, but Emacs already knows how to do that.

It's not going to require new features from Emacs, but it's not done
yet, and there does need to be a spec for the subset.  And the
Ecmascript and CSS for conventional browsers would also need to be
written.