Re: address@hidden: RE: cannot find :enable in Elisp manualindex]

[Karl Berry]

    I wonder if there is a clean and simple way to implement
    these features (menus and indices) with valid "ordinary" HTML,

They are.  They are lists of links.  As in:
<ul>
<li><a href="somenode.html">Menu item</a>
...

(Of course there are lots of details, but that's the basic idea.)

    and label that valid HTML as "menu" or "index" using `div',

Right now they have classes specified in the <ul> element:
<ul class="menu"> ... </ul>
<ul class="index-fn" compact> ... </ul>

If it's desirable to use <div> for some reason, that's obviously easy to
do.
    
    However, in practice, using a subset of HTML would allow any browser
    to display Info files.  Could TexinfoML XML do that?

I'm not sure.  It is possible to associate "style information", at
least, with an XML schema that a browser would see, but whether that is
enough to do a good job, I've never investigated.  Maybe someone would
like to do that.


Using the HTML output vs. using the TexinfoML output are quite different
approaches.  Which one is better depends on how much of the rendering
you want to control in Emacs.  If you want complete control, then it
would make sense to use TexinfoML, whose goal is basically to be an XML
transliteration of the input.

The HTML (or XHTML) output is more of a "processed form" similar in
spirit to Info -- although it is certainly possible to affect the look
of the HTML output at HTML-rendering time, there are more limits than in
the XML approach.

As an example, consider the HTML for a node, which starts a paragraph,
includes the next/prev pointers as text, defines anchors to make
cross-references work, and so on:

<div class="node">
<p><hr>
<a name="%5ctypein"></a>
<a name="g_t_005ctypein"></a>
Next:&nbsp;<a rel="next" accesskey="n" href="#g_t_005ctypeout">\typeout</a>,
Up:&nbsp;<a rel="up" accesskey="u" href="#Terminal-Input_002fOutput">Terminal 
Input/Output</a>

</div>

Compare that with the TexinfoML XML, which merely declares what the
various components are and says nothing about how they are displayed:

  <node>
    <nodename>\typein</nodename>
    <nodenext>\typeout</nodenext>
    <nodeup>Terminal Input/Output</nodeup>
...

Hope this helps,
karl