Re: Texinfo -> HTML issues

[Dumas Patrice]

Hi,

> * Makinfo's goal of HTML being somewhere between HTML-2.0 and HTML-4
>   makes little sense.  I am unaware of anything that manuals should
>   have that isn't supported by HTML-3.2.  Is this an
>   internationalization issue?  What problem does this agnosticism
>   solve?

My understanding of the issue is that makeinfo generated html is more 
like html 4 transitional. The reason is that some formatting can only be 
done with CSS (things like @example and friends). And moreover CSS is used
for customization of documents made by makeinfo.

>   It is better to have predictable
>   node names than to have obscure ones which never-ever conflict.

I devised the new scheme for node names to file names and html identifier
mapping like that because I thought that the important thing was to have
predictable node names such that html manual cross refs are stable (with
primary concern about texi2html and makeinfo inter-operability). And to
achieve that goal I considered that all the conflicts possibilities (and
encodings and @-commands in node names) had to be taken into account once 
for all such that cross refs never change in the future. As a result the node 
file name for node containing characters other than letter digits and space 
have _XXXX in them now. This is indeed a debatable choice, but 
mapping

@node that & this
to
that---this

isn't much better. It would have been better to map - to - and _ to _ but
- are used for spaces and _ is used to disambiguate all the non 
digit/letter/space characters.

There are some threads discussing my proposal on texinfo-pretest but I am
not sure they are more informative than what is in the texinfo manual.

>   I am not asking you to cater to my practices, but there should be
>   some method to let users support such per page headers.  That is
>   what extension languages are for.  Texinfo or makeinfo should make
>   Guile callbacks for HTML page headers and footers.

Currently, in makeinfo generated html, the customization is done with CSS.
(and a little bit of off topic advertising: you can still use texi2html and 
perl callbacks to achieve what you want...).

Pat