Re: A new online publishing tool for Texinfo documents.

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:
>> >> 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.
>> >
>> > Whatever, as you say, because Emacs is so adaptable we can achieve
>> > something. It's just "what thing" which is important.
>> 
>> JavaScript is mostly useful for web applications supposed to run in
>> mainstream browsers.  But for such browsers HTML files is already
>> good enough solution.  What is rather needed is to improve Emacs
>> Info browser.  
>
> Just to be clear. Bob Chassell and I are proposing a new system for
> making Texinfo documentation available over the web. It's not a
> replacement for Emacs Info mode. But it is intended that users of
> Emacs web browsers will be able to view the HTML produced by the new
> system.

I still think that there is no need to add Javascript and XSLT engines
to Emacs.  The solution you propose will be useful for web browsers
because they have no other extensibility mechanisms.  But Emacs could
handle pages received from server by using local Emacs Lisp programs.
The received pages could contain some indication about their type so
that Emacs will decide what functions to call to handle them.  And
this is much safer than to embed Emacs Lisp code on the web pages.

> Personally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with current Emacs Info. I
> use it an awfull lot (I use Texinfo for all my word processing tasks
> and info mode for viewing all the documentation I have to write as
> part of my work) as well as using Info from the console.

I like the current Emacs Info too because it is fast and well suited
for viewing the reference manuals.  However, I want to fix some minor
problems recently reported in it.

> Right now, I almost never read HTML Info documents. I hope that the
> new system Bob and I are talking about will change that a bit.

I hope it will change that for the better ;-)

-- 
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