Re: Changes to Texinfo DTD

[Oliver Scholz <epameinondas@gmx.de>]

Nic Ferrier <nferrier@tapsellferrier.co.uk> writes:

> Oliver Scholz <epameinondas@gmx.de> writes:
[...]
>> I take that to mean: to write an entirely new program that does the
>> same job as the current standalone reader, but renders XML. I fail to
>> see the benefit.
[...]
>> More importantly: it would be a *lot* of work and you would need
>> somebody who implements it.

[...]
> It wouldn't be a lot of work. It would be trivial with XSLT. There
> are basically 2 ways of doing it:
>
>
> Method 1.
[...]
> c) write an XSLT stylesheet to turn the XML into HTML with navigation
>    written in Javascript (so key bindings can be used)
>
> d) serve the files to Mozilla (or IE or any other XSLT aware browser)
>    and it will render the XML using the stylesheet
>
> e) For Emacs/W3 we'd have to write an XSLT processing solution, they
>    are being worked on I understand. It would be very trivial to write
>    one using a command line XSLT tool but see method 2.

It seems to me that we are talking about entirely different things. I
wrote under the assumption that a small and lightweight standalone
info reader that works on a console is necessary. It is not that I am
particulary fond of that reader. In fact I have never used it before
this thread started. It is just that I believe that such a
minimalistic reader must exist, because info is the GNU system's
primary help and documentation system. Since everybody in this thread
seemed to agree that getting the standalone console reader to support
a new format would be the hart part, I focused only on this reader.

I think your proposal to enable XSLT aware web browsers to serve as
full info readers is great. But I also think that there has to be at
least one simple, independent solution with minimum requirements that
works under all circumstances, including working on a Linux tty.

If you can make your solution for Emacs work without a significant
performance loss (Emacs/W3 is not the fastest html renderer known to
mankind), then this is fine for me, personally. Though, I don't like
the idea of making C-h i depend on yet another external program,
unless this program ships with the Emacs tarball.


[...]
>> That would also be a *lot* more work and maybe it could even be worse
>> performance-wise than rendering the XML directly in Elisp. You'd have
>> the process communication *and* you would still need to parse and
>> render some ad hoc made markup from the standalone reader.
>
> Nah. Just call out to a command line XSLT engine to turn the XML into
> HTML.
[...]

That's still process communication + rendering.

    Oliver
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