Re: Any interest in using HTML for locally-installed Texinfo documentation?

[Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2019 at 11:21:32PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > One thought is that there may be other "layout engines" that could be 
> > used, such as those in various GUI toolkits.
> 
> Yes, the GTK+ stacks has everything we need to display hypertext
> content nicely, I believe.

OK, so embedding a full web browser might not be necessary.

> >> When talking about ease of access, we can’t ignore keyword searches.
> >> How would you do ‘info -k’?
> >
> > I don't know.  You would have to have some way of finding all the 
> > installed manuals.
> 
> One option would be to have the option of letting ‘info’ parse HTML
> files or a pre-built keyword database.

This is possible, assuming the code for this is not in JavaScript.

> >> What about inter-manual cross-references?
> >> Would we need a mechanism similar to ‘htmlxref.cnf’ but that would
> >> browse local manuals?
> >
> > Good question.  The inter-manual links in locally-installed HTML files 
> > would have to be recognizable.  They could look like
> >
> > <a href="../texinfo/index.html#Top">Texinfo</a>
> >
> > instead of
> >
> > <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/index.html#Top">Texinfo</a>
> 
> Hmm, I’m skeptical.  :-)

Some other appropriate syntax could be devised.

> And we haven’t talked about $INFOPATH yet.

I anticipate that the help program would intercept links to external 
manuals and interpret them in terms of INFOPATH or an equivalent 
environment variable.