Re: docstrings and elisp reference

[Etienne Prud’homme]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't know what you mean by "for the most part", but since it cannot
> simply display a GNU manual converted to HTML by texi2any, I guess
> something else is needed that a docset needs to provide that isn't
> readily available.  So packages need to _want_ to provide this format,
> otherwise their docs will not be viewable in Zeal.

You previously said that you had enough of this discussion and I would
understand if you don’t read it.  I explained the process in a response
to RMS:

> Therefore, for an index to be created, we either have to use Natural
> Language Processing (which we never do) or use some kind of clues in
> the HTML document describing the type of information to index.

> The perfect way would be to use XML directly, but few or no projects
> use it.  We instead rely on the HTML tag class names from the
> documentation documents.  Almost every time, they can be really
> helpful to know the type of the tagged information.  Most developpers
> making the CSS stylesheets use names like “function” (or an other
> arbitrary name) when tagging the functions.  That’s the same for
> variables, macros, etc.

But as I said also in the same post, it looks like Jean-Christophe is
right in saying we don’t use the exporting templates enough.  The texi
files seems to have a lot of meaningful “tags” (I call that semantic) we
could use when exporting the manual documentation to HTML.  Why not even
use JavaScript to enable searching the manuals and/or
expanding/collapsing setions.

A good example of what could be done is the ECMAScript 2018 Language
Specifications[1].

[1] https://tc39.github.io/ecma262/ (WARNING: It looks a JS file doesn’t
contain any license information for LibreJS users, but the blocked
script is licensed under MIT).

--
Etienne