Re: Texinfo -> HTML issues

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Aubrey Jaffer <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 20:02:19 -0400 (EDT)
> 
> Recoding every "-" as _002d is hideous; and totally unnecessary on a
> file-system supporting spaces or "-" in filenames.

This actually used to work that way, but was changed in the latest
code base to avoid the need to resolve file-name conflicts by putting
several nodes on the same file.

> Please make this recoding an option to makeinfo.

I don't think this is a good idea: if a user option can control file
names, cross-document references will not be reliable.

> Certain characters like "/" or "\" are bad for filesystems.  But they
> need not be ASCII coded; just convert them to "-".  The only time this
> will lose is if someone has nodes named "File I/O" and "File I-O" --
> not a common occurence.

The question is: what do we do when we ``lose'' like that?  It turns
out that GNU documentation hits such problems more times than we could
ignore.

>   slib.texi:108: Unknown command `ifnotex'.

It's @ifnottex (two `t's).

>  | > * makeinfo HTML pages don't pass validator.w3.org because they lack a
>  | >   DTD.  Why isn't one generated?
>  | 
>  | I was told older versions of some browsers had problems with DTD
>  | lines.  Otherwise I would already have added one.
> 
> How many years will makeinfo continue to produce nonconforming HTML in
> support of this rumored browser bug?

It's not rumored, it's real.

I guess we could drop that in a release or two, it's been a long time.

> Using HTML-4 when its extra features are not required needlessly
> breaks rendering on older browsers.

Which ones?  I think the HTML output was tested on a wide variety of
browsers, including very old ones, and it worked everywhere.