Re: Ability to disable URL mangling in makeinfo 4.7?

[Patrice Dumas]

> Are we restricted to the set of a-z0-9_- also for anchors?  Given our
> experience, all web clients seem to support at least '*' as well.

In XHTML, the name= attribute is of type id, and thus can only contain
a-z0-9_- therefore the issue is not with hrefs pointing to documents (which
can use the % escaping) but with anchors in the document. Of course the 
browsers support invalid XHTML, and thus accepts name= with any character,
but if the convention for cross manual reference don't enforce a-z0-9_-
it is impossible to write valid XHTML manuals. As this convention has been 
made to last very long this kind of issue had to be taken into account. For
example texi2html can produce valid transitionnal XHTML and thus allowing
other characters in cross refs would have cause either texi2html not to use
the same convention than makeinfo for external manual cross references, or 
produce invalid XHTML. As a side effect it is a right set of characters for 
filenames.

Pat