Re: [GSoC] Proposal for JavaScript for info-style navigation.

[Mathieu Lirzin]

Hello,

Per Bothner <address@hidden> writes:

> On 03/29/2017 01:21 PM, Mathieu Lirzin wrote:
>> As suggested by Per, I have re-read his texinfo roadmap in more details.
>
> While I re-emphasize this is my personal roadmap of how I think texinfo should
> evolve (not everyone agrees ...), I think there is general agreement of the
> value of a nice JavaScript-based UI for texinfo/html documents.

Yes, that was my understanding.  I guess the replacement of the info
format with hinfo and the use of epub for packaging it are the more
controversial propositions?

If I remember past discussion on this ML there was a disagreement
regarding wether HTML export should use HTML4 or HTML5 standard (the
later would help manipulating the DOM with Javascript) but since the
goal is to use a HTML5 compatible format for the xhtml output.  I guess
this is not a controversy anymore.

What are the known controversial parts of your personnal roadmap?

>> This reading has been really helpful to understand the various issues
>> regarding the HTML output and learn about the possible solutions that
>> will allow a better Web UI.
>>
>> I have sent a draft of my proposal which can be found here:
>>
>>   http://mathieu.lirzin.emi.u-bordeaux.fr/gsoc/texinfo.pdf
>>
>> Any comment or remark that could help improving my proposal before the
>> due date are welcome.
>
> It seems fine.  The roadmap section is a bit thin.
> Some more detail would be nice.  I mean: I know what I would do,
> but it would good for you to show (in your own words) what you plan to do.

I will rework it.

> Do you know Perl?  Are you comfortable making changes to the makeinfo source,
> which is mostly Perl?  It not necessary, and it may actually be an unwise
> distraction from focusing on the JavaScript, just using the existing 
> kawa.epub.
> However, the way kawa.epub is built by first translating to DocBook isn't
> really satisfactory, so a some point we want to use makeinfo's html output
> directly, which means cleaning up and enhancing the the latter,

I have some basic Perl knowledge, however modifying the makeinfo source
would require a deep study of the AST structure and the output
generation mechanism before being able to actually work on it (I would
estimate the effort to 2~3 weeks).  If the Javascript implementation
goes well, I can definitely spend some time on the html/xhtml5 output.

Thanks for the comments.

-- 
Mathieu Lirzin
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