Re: Ability to disable URL mangling in makeinfo 4.7?

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Andreas,

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 01:42:30AM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:
> 
> >     Are we restricted to the set of a-z0-9_- also for anchors?  Given our
> >     experience, all web clients seem to support at least '*' as well.
> >
> > I can believe that other characters are supported in anchor names
> > (although I thought that XML had very restrictive rules).  In any case,
> > it seems simpler to map a node name to the same string, whether it is
> > used as an anchor name or a filename, instead of having different rules.
> 
> I may be missing something, but isn't %xy the preferred way to quote
> special characters in URLs?

There are two problems:

1) Mangling of the node names for filenames.
The main problem here isn't how to cite the URL, but how to name the
physical file.
Various filenames have various limitations, and we have to use the
intersection of all.

This is also the most annoying problem, when you have

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Statements_002fLines.html

instead of eg.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Statements-Lines.html

Note: If you typed
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Statements%2fLines.html
to you browser, you'd still ask for file Lines.html in subdir Statements.

2) Mangling of the node names for anchor names.

Yes, it seems you are right, anchor names can contain any characters.
(I quickly looked at various documents on www.w3c.org. I'm not an expert
do forgive me if I'm misleaded.)

When defining/using them, you have to use the proper escaping.
This escaping would be character entities (/) in HTML 4.01, and
percent-escaping (%2f) in XML.  But this is a problem for programmers.

So, you could have:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Statements_002fLines.html#Statements/Lines
instead of
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Statements_002fLines.html#Statements_002fLines

Would this help so much?

And, of course, the real browsers would surely differ from what the
standards require.

Stepan