Re: formatting of @sc in HTML

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 08:18:28PM +0100, Arsen Arsenović wrote:
> 
> Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr> writes:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > Currently @sc is formatted in HTML by putting the argument in <small>
> > and upper-casing the argument.  There is a CSS property, font-variant-caps
> > for small caps.  It may be relevant to use it instead of th ecurrent
> > setup.  However, when there is no CSS, for instance in text-based
> > browser, the result may not be so good.
> 
> IMO, it's okay to use that CSS property if it's the best way to achieve
> the result.  We shouldn't optimize for w3m, eww, etc.
> 
> What are the pros and cons of either approaches?

I have a collection of about 200 Texinfo manuals that I scraped in
January 2021, so I thought it was worth seeing how @sc was used in
practice.

It is pretty common to use @sc with a lower case argument where the
argument is intended to be in upper case.  Some examples:

@sc{gnu}, @sc{ascii}, @sc{posix}, @sc{unix}, @sc{ip}, @sc{c}, @sc{gif}

I'm attaching a slightly edited result of 'grep @sc . -R' in
my dump directory.

If it was just people's surnames, then it would be okay to use CSS,
as the output would be acceptable without CSS, but we do not want
to rely on CSS for acceptable output.

Hence, although using CSS is a nice idea and would be what we would
want to use if it were always available, it cannot be justified to
break these usages for browsers that do not use it.

matches.out
Description: Text document