Re: spec for @inlinehtml etc.

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 02:59:24PM -0800, Karl Berry wrote:
>     But having a new context in which the only recognized @-commands are
>     the @-commands escaping @, } { and , should not be that hard.
> 
> (and \)
> 
> But what about switching to actually executing "most" commands, when
> they make sense?  Since that is what C makeinfo did, apparently.  How
> hard would that be, any idea?

If I am not wrong this would mean that the main difference with normal
Texinfo code would be that text would be raw text, that is, no escaping of 
special characters.  Also no paragraph?  What about block commands?  
Would something like the following be acceptable?

 @html

 @table @asis
 @item <br> something
 @end table

 @example
 An example &eacute;
 @end example

 @end html

Would @math, @footnote be acceptable in raw blocks?  And @center? @anchor?
@c, @comment?

In any case, that would certainly be doable.  In fact, the most simpler could
certainly be to consider those blocks as preformatted (as if in @example
and similar) and in addition mark text with type 'raw'.

For most converters, there would certainly be no need for change.  

However, it is not convenient for the hack of using tex4ht or latex2html
to convert @tex blocks to HTML.  Indeed, this relies on having the @tex block 
being considered as raw TeX, without @-commands expansions.  It is not 
clear, however that this is really an issue.  For such blocks, the 
Texinfo::Convert::Texinfo convert which converts back to texinfo code
could be called prior from doing something else.

> If that is a lot harder, we can try accepting the "character" commands
> only inside raw text, and see what happens with users.  It would mean a
> discrepancy between texinfo.tex and tp, but that doesn't seem critical.

I think it is better to do the right thing for such an important issue
even if it delays a bit the release.

-- 
Pat