Re: Texinfo -> HTML issues

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Aubrey Jaffer <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 00:13:24 -0400 (EDT)
> 
> Now that makeinfo can produce HTML, it would be nice to escape my
> 1996-syntax straight-jacket maintaining compatibility with texi2html.
> But the makeinfo generated HTML has many problems of its own.  It may
> be too much to hope that texinfo developers would bend on so many
> issues, but here they are.

As others told you, there are valid technical reasons for what Texinfo
does.  While the current solutions might not be the best possible ones
(and, in fact, some of them are being worked on by Alper as we speak),
no one has yet come up with better one; if you have specific
suggestions, they will be most welcome.

>     * Each directory, in the web server tree, should have an index.html
>       symbolic link to the top-level html file for that directory. Use
>       the |.symlinks| file to handle this.

One problem with symbolic links is that they are not portable to
non-Posix platforms.

> * The tag NAME= names all unique numbers appended to them.  This makes
>   it impossible to refer to index points like function names which
>   remain stable.  Again, someone's zeal for rigidly complete solutions
>   has torpedoed a valuable feature.

The reason was not rigidity, but solution of specific practical
problems; one of them was that references should work regardless of
whether the HTML file is produce with or without the --no-split
option.

> * For a large manual like SLIB, makeinfo generates a single 1840-line
>   "Index.html" file which is slow to load, even on a fast computer.
>   Those indexes should be split, at the minimum, into the three
>   individual index tables.

Please suggest how to split them without producing invalid HTML or
failing the most important requirement: that references from other
documents predictably produce correct links, even when the target
document is not available to makeinfo at the time it produces HTML
output.

> * Further burdening Index.html is the full "Table of Contents".

If you don't like it, you can always condition @contents with
@ifnothtml, for example.

>   The full table of contents should be put in its own file.

Makeinfo cannot produce node names where there aren't any in the
Texinfo source.

>   I am not asking you to cater to my practices, but there should be
>   some method to let users support such per page headers.

How about @html?

> If anyone is interested in more detail, I can provide more explicit
> suggestions.

Yes, please do.  These issues are always done and undone by the gory
details.