Re: makeinfo - plans to generate XHTML 1.0 Transitional?

[Karl Berry]

    If Texinfo does generate HTML in the "<br />" style of XHTML, then it no
    longer validates as HTML.

Argh!!  I guess I misunderstood Janis and Gerald.  The browsers seem
happy enough with <br />.  It's very sad that it doesn't validate.

Personally, I think all these incompatible standards and validations are
absurd.  That's why I don't wish to output a doctype declaration (for
HTML output) -- there is nothing reasonable to declare.  I just want to
output something that displays ok for the actual users (including ones
who (gasp) aren't using the latest browsers), not placate standards
committees.  I am not going to change this basic stance of html output
for the next release, at any rate.

Did the texinfo html output ever validate, even before the <br /> stuff?
That was never a goal, so if it did, it was an accident :).

I don't know what to do.  For the next release, I'm not going to add
xhtml as a new output format, that would be much too big of a change.
On the other hand, obviously I want to help support the gcc web pages as
much as I can.

Gerald and Janis, you were the proponents of <br />.  Can you advise
please?

Thanks,
karl


Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2002 07:56:55 -0500
From: Stephen Gildea <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: makeinfo - plans to generate XHTML 1.0 Transitional? 

If Texinfo does generate HTML in the "<br />" style of XHTML, then it no
longer validates as HTML.  Because the output isn't completely XHTML,
then Texinfo output cannot be validated as any flavor of HTML.

I can see that it would be useful for some people if Texinfo HTML output
were more XML-like.  But please make this optional so that we don't lose
what I see as the equally important feature of generating a
consistently-correct document.

It seems to me that makeinfo should always output a DOCTYPE declaration
at the top of a HTML document so we know what we are trying to conform
to.  An option to output XHTML would change this declaration, and
everybody would know what they were getting.  I am happy to see that
makeinfo already does this with the --xml or --docbook options.

I know that a few years ago getting the HTML output to display correctly
on all browsers was a major challenge, and standards conformance only a
minor consideration.  I think things have changed now, and most popular
browsers do very well with HTML 4.01 Transitional.  Some can even handle
more recent or stricter flavors of HTML.  Thus I think it is now
appropriate to generate standard HTML and to use a DOCTYPE to state your
conformance.

See http://validator.w3.org/ for the W3C's validation service.