Re: bad relative urls in texinfo-4.0f

[Per Bothner]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Per Bothner wrote:
> >>The appended patch seems to do what I need.  If there are
> > any down-sides to it, I don't see it.
> I thought I've been explaining the downsides this whole thread.

We've talking a little bit past each other.  You did write that
one reason for the anchors was to go past the html pre-amble, or
past the toc.  I don't understand why that is an issue.  The remaining
issue is when multiple nodes with different names accidentally
get mapped to the same filename.  I still see that as a pathological
situation, and I'm more concerned about nice behavior in the normal
situation than worryng about the pathological situation.
If you have two unrelated nodes ending up on the same web-page because
they accidentally have similar names, then that is a more fundamental
problem and anchors isn't going to solve the brokenness.

> How about a command-line option to do what you want?  If the person
> who produces the HTML version is certain there are no clashes between
> file names, or doesn't mind having navigation problems if there are
> clashes,

You *will* have navigation problems if there are clashes, even with
anchors, because having unrelated nodes on the same web page because
they have similar names is just confusing and wrong, period.

> she could use that option to get rid of the #anchors in the URLs.
>
> Would that be good enough?

It would be acceptable to me, but I happen to think it should be the
default.  In fact, I think rather than a switch to turn anchors on
or off, you should have a switch that generates files names using the
same mangling that you currently use for anchors.  That way you're
guaranteed that each node has its own page, so you don't need the
anchors.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://www.bothner.com/per/