Re: makeinfo - plans to generate XHTML 1.0 Transitional?

[Stephen Gildea]

If Texinfo does generate HTML in the "<br />" style of XHTML, then it no
longer validates as HTML.  Because the output isn't completely XHTML,
then Texinfo output cannot be validated as any flavor of HTML.

I can see that it would be useful for some people if Texinfo HTML output
were more XML-like.  But please make this optional so that we don't lose
what I see as the equally important feature of generating a
consistently-correct document.

It seems to me that makeinfo should always output a DOCTYPE declaration
at the top of a HTML document so we know what we are trying to conform
to.  An option to output XHTML would change this declaration, and
everybody would know what they were getting.  I am happy to see that
makeinfo already does this with the --xml or --docbook options.

I know that a few years ago getting the HTML output to display correctly
on all browsers was a major challenge, and standards conformance only a
minor consideration.  I think things have changed now, and most popular
browsers do very well with HTML 4.01 Transitional.  Some can even handle
more recent or stricter flavors of HTML.  Thus I think it is now
appropriate to generate standard HTML and to use a DOCTYPE to state your
conformance.

See http://validator.w3.org/ for the W3C's validation service.