Re: Broken link at http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/

[John Mandereau]

On 2008/07/11 10:46 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> I think it is worth mentionning the weaknesses of texi2html. I think
> that the most problematic one is the home made parser. It is not that
> complicated for the 2 first passes. But in the last pass, it gets very
> complicated. There is a       stack with @-commands with braces and 'formats'
> (@table, @itemize, @cartouche....) and, in parallel a state which holds 
> document-wide informations, including some stacks, to know which format 
> of each type is on the top for complicated imbrications. In the stack 
> there are fake formats that are not really formats from a texinfo 
> perspective but are important for nesting, like a definition body, a 
> cell and lrow in a multitable. There are exceptions everywhere with 
> complicated conditions on the state. Another complication is that
> formatting of some things may lead to nested formatting, like, for
> example, a footnote text in normal text.
>
> I don't know if it is because of a poor design of the parser (which was
> never designed, and never really redesigned when new texinfo language
> rules appeared) or because texinfo is intrinsically complicated, but 
> it is quite messy and I am often lost in it.

In case it wasn't clear from what I previously wrote, note that I
haven't read texi2html code; I only skimmed a little through it, and I
might understand that you are lost in it, when you have very long
functions (1442 lines for rearrange_elements()).  Maybe you have
designed this purposely to save function calls, but I would be lost in
this too if I had to maintain it: such huge control-flow blocks are hard
to read.

I'd like to explain in a few words the (still incomplete) design of my
hypothetical project; if it's not implemented from scratch, it might
help give ideas for improving portions of texi2html.  However, it's late
for me this evening |-), I'll come back with it within one week.

Cheers,
John