Re: imbrications and ---

[Dumas Patrice]

Hi Karl,

> 1) in its present incarnation, texinfo.tex doesn't do nested styles
>    (except for some cases of tt + slanted/italic).  This is partly because:
> 2) there is no standard bold typewriter font.

That's really bad !!!

> 3) Thus, prompted a previous bug report some time ago, the HTML was
>    (painfully) changed so that it did not do nested style stuff either,
>    so that the same Texinfo input would produce (closer to) the same
>    appearance in HTML and TeX.

I tend to disagree. In my opinion it is the texinfo which is wrong and
should be changed (even though nobody knows when ;), and in the HTML
there should still be nested style.

> 4) I changed @cite recently in texinfo.tex to unconditionally use \sl,
>    never \ttsl.  I could not imagine when anyone would ever want to have
>    book titles printed in typewriter.

Indeed, this was just a random test case. However something like @strong{go 
read @cite{a book}} make sense in my opinion.

> 5) Mixing physical and logical markup seems a rather dubious practice
>    in general.  I'm not sure I want to define what happens when @b is
>    mixed with @command, or @cite with @command.  The combinations don't
>    make logical sense.  @b with @i or @t, yes.

I disagree. It seems to me that something like @b{this is a @command{command}}
does make sense. Using @b is bad style but if a command appears in the 
bold text then it should be marked as a command. The same for 
@i{this is a @command{command}}. I admit that @t mixed with logical markup
is very dubious. And also the reverse, physical within logical style 
(@address@hidden command}}) doesn't make much sense.

Anyway I think that in HTML any nesting should be accepted, in my opinion
it is the browser choice to ignore it or not.

> So, I'm not sure what behavior to try to converge to.  What do you think?
> 
> Although I wouldn't mind doing nested styles by default, that's a big
> change in texinfo.tex and won't happen any time soon.

I am for nested style, maybe with logical ignoring the inner physical styles
in texinfo. I also seems to me that some logical nesting make sense, like 
@strong{go read @cite{a book}}, while other don't, like @address@hidden
or @address@hidden book}}.
Taking into account every possibility sounds rather complicated, though...

Pat