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Re: 6.1: HTML5 makes the attribute "name" in hypertext anchors obsolete.


From: Per Bothner
Subject: Re: 6.1: HTML5 makes the attribute "name" in hypertext anchors obsolete.
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2016 13:44:42 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.2.0



On 08/05/2016 10:22 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
On 5 August 2016 at 16:59, Patrice Dumas <address@hidden> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 05, 2016 at 10:33:41AM -0400, Robert Weiner wrote:
Just a small thing.

As of Texinfo 6.1, HTML output is generating anchors like so:

<a name="Smart-Keys"></a>

The non-obsolete way of doing that now, compatible with HTML5 and prior
versions is:

<a id="Smart-Keys"></a>

Using id instad of name leads to validation errors with the 4.01
doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd";>

That's because in this dtd, id type is ID which is too restrictive,
while in html5 it is much less restricted.

It is possible to abandon strict validity, I guess that most if not all
browser are ok with id with less restrictive content, but having
something valid is also very convenient to debug the html.

That's good to know. As long as we are targetting the 4.01
transitional version, we should definitely use <a name=...> instead of
<a id=...>.

I think it long past time to *stop* targeting 4.01 transitional
The target should be valid  HTML5 that is with a reasonable fallback to older 
4.x browsers.

Texinfo is becoming increasingly irrelevant.  While texinfo is never
going to become mainstream, it would be nice to not be an embarrassment.
That means a roadmap where HTML (and derived formats like epub) are the
primary online documentation output format and info is dropped.

Part of the roadmap is an Emacs mode that is a hybrid of eww (for processing
the html) and info mode (for the  user interface).  It also includes an
improved JavaScript-based UI when browsing documentation with a vanilla browser.
It also includes making it easier to convert texinfo to epub electronic books.

All of these things will be easier and less ugly if we follow modern
web specifications.  Getting rid of <a name="XXX"> is a necessary step.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/



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