Re: Changes to Texinfo DTD

[Oliver Scholz]

"Robert J. Chassell" <address@hidden> writes:

> Oliver Scholz <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>    So I have offered to hack the standalone info reader so that it
>    would support the XML format in the same way that I have chosen in
>    my patch. But I got not response so far.
>
> Heh... that might be a good idea.  However, I don't think I know of
> anyone who uses the standalone Info reader; they all use Emacs Info
> instead....  So I cannot give you any useful advice on this.

My proposal is to keep the current text/plain info format as an
internal representation in the standalone info reader. 

The reader would then check whether a particular file is in the
text/plain info format or in the XML format. If the former: business
as usual. If the latter, it would convert this XML to plain/text with
the necessary ^_ and the necessary "tags:" section and whatever else
is required *on the fly*. That's the way the patch works that I sent
earlier. Since I won't touch the code of the standalone reader at any
other place, I would need advice mainly on the specification of the
current info format.

IMO this change is the easiest and the least intrusive. I believe that
the transition to a new format would be painless this way. You could
have both the current (then old) info format and the new XML format in
/usr/info and other directories at the same time. The info reader
would just DTRT.

As I said: writing a non-conforming parser for a particular,
machine-generated XML in Emacs Lisp is very, very easy. So info.el
should probably do something slightly more sophisticated with the XML
format and provide more bells&whistles. Or at least we could add the
bells&whistles at a later time. I am not familiar with the code of
info.el and I don't want to deal with it right now.  But I'd offer to
implement any API for dealing with the XML that somebody who wants to
hack info.el would specify.

So. I have stated my cause now. :-)


    Oliver
-- 
Oliver Scholz               30 Brumaire an 212 de la Révolution
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