Re: bad relative urls in texinfo-4.0f

[Per Bothner]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 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.
> I don't see what problems you envision.

Suppose you have nodes named 'Foo~' and 'Foo_' that both map to
Foo.html.  Assume that both nodes are actually in very different
parts of the manual, and don't belong together.  I..e. there are
other nodes between 'Foo~' and 'Foo_', but they get mapped to other
files.  If you use anchors, yes, you can get the navigation to work.
But really, why bother?  It is *wrong* to have both nodes on the same
page, and it will confuse the reader.

> There are gobs of documents out there with multiple nodes per file,

But we're only disagreeing about the case when you are splitting
and *trying* to get one node per file.  Are there gobs of documents
where there are multiple nodes with different names, but similar
enough that they map to the same filename?

> Makeinfo 4.0 was producing a single HTML file with all the nodes on
> it, and I'm not aware of any problems with that, either.

That's fine - my only disagreement is when we're splitting.

> And I think that having the #anchor in the URL bar is not something
> you should bother about.  Can we meet halfway?

Yes.  You're the maintainer (?), and you make the decision.
As long as I have a way of getting the output I want, I can
live with it, even if I disagree with the choice of 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.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand this suggestion.  Could you please
> elaborate?

Supposed you have a node 'foo~bar', which currently gets mangled
to a filename 'foo-bar' and anchor 'foo%7ebar' (or whatever).
Instead of making the reference be 'foo-bar.html#foo%7ebar', I'm 
suggesting having an option where the filename is 'foo%7ebar.html'
and leaving out the anchor, since it is now fully redundant?
I don't think this should be the default, but it may be a useful
option, which may avoid the need for the option you suggest.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://www.bothner.com/per/