Texinfo future changes, deprecations and feature removals

[Gavin Smith]

Are there any comments on the following changes?

* In HTML output, I would like to omit the colon by default in menus
after the node names, as it is visual clutter. (This would be done by
setting the default value of MENU_ENTRY_COLON to the empty string.)

* I would like to remove the following references to the @small*
commands in the CSS header for HTML files:

  <style type="text/css">
  <!--
  a.summary-letter {text-decoration: none}
  blockquote.indentedblock {margin-right: 0em}
- blockquote.smallindentedblock {margin-right: 0em; font-size: smaller}
- blockquote.smallquotation {font-size: smaller}
  div.display {margin-left: 3.2em}
  div.example {margin-left: 3.2em}
  div.lisp {margin-left: 3.2em}
- div.smalldisplay {margin-left: 3.2em}
- div.smallexample {margin-left: 3.2em}
- div.smalllisp {margin-left: 3.2em}
  kbd {font-style: oblique}
  pre.display {font-family: inherit}
  pre.format {font-family: inherit}
  pre.menu-comment {font-family: serif}
  pre.menu-preformatted {font-family: serif}
- pre.smalldisplay {font-family: inherit; font-size: smaller}
- pre.smallexample {font-size: smaller}
- pre.smallformat {font-family: inherit; font-size: smaller}
- pre.smalllisp {font-size: smaller}
  span.nolinebreak {white-space: nowrap}
  span.roman {font-family: initial; font-weight: normal}
  span.sansserif {font-family: sans-serif; font-weight: normal}
  ul.no-bullet {list-style: none}
  -->
  </style>

These @small* commands are mainly useful for printed output so that
examples can fit on a single page. Their use should be discouraged, as
they are "non-semantic". (Making the display environments smaller
should probably be controlled another way, e.g. by specifying
@smallbook.) This would cut down the amount of CSS output
significantly.

* I would like to warn that the use of noderename.cnf files is
deprecated, and remove them in a future release. I haven't been able
to find anybody using them (if anybody knows of an instance, please
let me know). This would allow cutting down the interdependencies
between the Perl modules in texi2any. (HTML.pm calls
Texinfo::Parser::duplicate_parser in the code for handling
noderename.cnf, and that is the only place that subroutine is called
anywhere in the code. HTML.pm only uses a subroutine from Parser.pm in
one other place, which is also part of the code that deals with
renamed nodes.) It would allow removing a bit of complexity in the
code and in the test framework. Using @anchor to deal with renamed
nodes is a better choice, as this works with Info and other output
formats. (Less importantly, I don't like the "@{}" syntax.)

* Remove the DEL quoting mechanism for Info files, if we agree on a
way on supporting colons in index entries. Recent mail:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2019-01/msg00055.html