Re: Broken link at http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/

[Patrice Dumas]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 06:32:44PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> 
> Anyway, it's an interesting hypothetical world we're entering into.  I
> feel I should at least mention it to rms, but if he doesn't have violent
> objections (which he might), and you are willing to work on the missing
> back end(s), and that running tests on actual manuals works out ok, I
> guess I don't have any objection in principle to the replacement.  Oh,

I think it is worth mentionning the weaknesses of texi2html. I think
that the most problematic one is the home made parser. It is not that
complicated for the 2 first passes. But in the last pass, it gets very
complicated. There is a stack with @-commands with braces and 'formats'
(@table, @itemize, @cartouche....) and, in parallel a state which holds 
document-wide informations, including some stacks, to know which format 
of each type is on the top for complicated imbrications. In the stack 
there are fake formats that are not really formats from a texinfo 
perspective but are important for nesting, like a definition body, a 
cell and lrow in a multitable. There are exceptions everywhere with 
complicated conditions on the state. Another complication is that
formatting of some things may lead to nested formatting, like, for
example, a footnote text in normal text.

I don't know if it is because of a poor design of the parser (which was
never designed, and never really redesigned when new texinfo language
rules appeared) or because texinfo is intrinsically complicated, but 
it is quite messy and I am often lost in it.

--
Pat