Re: makeinfo - plans to generate XHTML 1.0 Transitional?

[Gerald Pfeifer]

Hi Karl,

On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Karl Berry wrote:
> We've tried to make makeinfo's html output look ok in a wide variety of
> browsers -- basically just requiring <table> support.

this is, in fact, quite similiar to what we have been doing for the GCC
web pages and the documentation (which we use makeinfo for).  However,
for one reason or another, XHTML seems to be quite popular and users
really seem to care about it.

As it does not hurt older browsers -- and we are very careful to also
keep our pages working fine for users of lynx (and visually impaired
users) -- we now try to conform to XHTML where possible.

> A couple specific questions ...
>
>     the end tag for @samp{<meta>} is omitted
>
> I was under the impression that no </meta> was necessary.

Yes, for older HTML standards that's absolutely correct. For XHTML the
recommended solution is to have <meta... />, which is both valid XHTML
and also HTML and works fine with all browsers I know.

>     an @samp{<hr>} tag should be emitted as @samp{<hr />}
>
> Won't that break older browsers?  Maybe <hr></hr> would be more compatible.

<hr /> and <br /> work fine with any browser I'm aware of, and I have
tried a couple of (especially older) browsers before switching to these
variants on the GCC pages.

> Overall, if you feel it's important to claim conformance to this
> standard, I'm afraid you'll have to postprocess the makeinfo output
> for the foreseeable future.  Sorry.

Do you think you could make, for now, those three changes above, i.e.
<meta... />, <br />, and <hr />?  That would be a step towards XHTML
without any potential to hurt HTML users, and I hope it won't be too
much work?

Perhaps later we'll have a volunteer who also addresses some of the
other (few) issues.

Ciao,
Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" address@hidden http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/