From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Richard Stallman Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: [drew.adams@oracle.com: RE: cannot find :enable in Elisp manualindex] Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:27:38 -0400 Message-ID: References: <200706030000.l5300AV09602@f7.net> Reply-To: rms@gnu.org NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15 X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1180906301 20717 80.91.229.12 (3 Jun 2007 21:31:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 21:31:41 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org To: karl@freefriends.org (Karl Berry) Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sun Jun 03 23:31:40 2007 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Huxfn-0008KL-CH for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:31:39 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Huxfm-0003tb-U3 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:31:38 -0400 Original-Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1HuxcF-0000fs-GY for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:27:59 -0400 Original-Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1HuxcE-0000eO-UG for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:27:59 -0400 Original-Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1HuxcE-0000de-La for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:27:58 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([199.232.76.164]) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1HuxcE-0000no-E5 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:27:58 -0400 Original-Received: from rms by fencepost.gnu.org with local (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1Huxbu-00063u-Pd; Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:27:38 -0400 In-reply-to: <200706030000.l5300AV09602@f7.net> (karl@freefriends.org) X-detected-kernel: Linux 2.6, seldom 2.4 (older, 4) X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:72152 Archived-At: It seems to me that neither \: nor SGML entities are a solution. Either one involves making normal characters special (\ or &#;), which will break lots of existing documents. There are Texinfo documents which have the literal text "&123;" precisely to document whatever &123; is. Are there info files that have constructs like &123; in the menu item names? That (and maybe xrefs) is where quoting is needed. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how having some simple HTML-ish output would solve the problem either. Even if we design and implement such a thing, Info output will still need to continue to exist for plenty of years to come, and therefore source documents could still not use : (or whatever) in node names. Even if we avoid using colon in menu items for a few more years, until we declare the old Info format obsolete, the plan can be a good one. It could provide a lot of different benefits in addition to using colons in menu names. For instance, we could have ^@^H[char xxxx^@^H] where xxxx are hex digits. We can use that as the short-term solution for colons in menu names. However, we should still consider moving to an HTML-based new Info format, as a long-term plan to provide many new features. One more thought: someone going to the trouble of writing a whole new viewer might as well use TexinfoML XML for its input, it seems to me (as Juri wrote). In principle, this might be just as good as using a subset of HTML. However, in practice, using a subset of HTML would allow any browser to display Info files. Could TexinfoML XML do that?