From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: =?utf-8?Q?Ludovic_Court=C3=A8s?= Subject: Re: Any interest in using HTML for locally-installed Texinfo documentation? Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2019 23:21:32 +0200 Message-ID: <87zhp6okdf.fsf@gnu.org> References: <87a7h8u4r4.fsf@gnu.org> <20190402150245.GA30067@darkstar> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20190402150245.GA30067@darkstar> (Gavin Smith's message of "Tue, 2 Apr 2019 16:02:45 +0100") List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: bug-texinfo-bounces+gnu-bug-texinfo2=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "bug-texinfo" To: Gavin Smith Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org, Texinfo List-Id: guix-devel.gnu.org Gavin Smith skribis: > On Tue, Apr 02, 2019 at 11:37:51AM +0200, Ludovic Court=C3=A8s wrote: >> (For some reason =E2=80=98i=E2=80=99 does open the index search box for = me, but then >> hitting enter doesn=E2=80=99t produce any effect. The other navigation = commands >> work fine, though.) > > It works on Firefox 53, at least. That=E2=80=99s with IceCat 60.6.1. > Using JavaScript within a web browser has big drawbacks due to its=20 > "sandboxed" nature. (You can't access environment variables, for=20 > example.) However, we'd want to avoid having to re-implement too much=20 > of the web browser; for example, input file parsing, text layout and font= =20 > rendering. > > One thought is that there may be other "layout engines" that could be=20 > used, such as those in various GUI toolkits. Yes, the GTK+ stacks has everything we need to display hypertext content nicely, I believe. >> When talking about ease of access, we can=E2=80=99t ignore keyword searc= hes. >> How would you do =E2=80=98info -k=E2=80=99? > > I don't know. You would have to have some way of finding all the=20 > installed manuals. One option would be to have the option of letting =E2=80=98info=E2=80=99 pa= rse HTML files or a pre-built keyword database. >> How would you even simply point your >> browser to a specific manual? > > Maybe there could be a command for this within the browser. There could= =20 > also be a command-line program that would launch the documentation=20 > browser. Sounds good. >> What about inter-manual cross-references? >> Would we need a mechanism similar to =E2=80=98htmlxref.cnf=E2=80=99 but = that would >> browse local manuals? > > Good question. The inter-manual links in locally-installed HTML files=20 > would have to be recognizable. They could look like > > Texinfo > > instead of > > Texinfo Hmm, I=E2=80=99m skeptical. :-) And we haven=E2=80=99t talked about $INFOPATH yet. >> What would be the recommended solution for Emacs >> and console users? > > Info files would carry on as an option. OK. > I'm getting the feeling that we need a web browser, or something like=20 > it, which can integrate with the operating system a lot more, without > sandboxing or security restrictions. Yelp apparently tried to address this very issue. Perhaps we could also check what=E2=80=99s missing to make it work correctly, or to make it = work better. One issue that Ricardo mentioned is text reflowing. To allow the UI to do that, we need to feed it with some markup language and not Info: HTML, XML, Texinfo, etc. Then it would have enough information to provide a rich interface comparable to what Texinfo-JS gives us. Sorry to answer with new questions! Ludo=E2=80=99.