RE: address@hidden: RE: cannot find :enable in Elispmanualindex]

[Drew Adams]

> > I wonder if we could use some limited subset of HTML, so that Emacs
> > could display it even though it doesn't really understand HTML.
> > Meanwhile, any browser could also display it, and standalone Info
> > could be a variant of a browser.

I won't get into a heated discussion about this (at least I'll try to stay
out ;-)), but I will say this, in spite of some good (and some not so good)
ideas voiced by Alan: I think it is a _good_ idea - one worth exploring
(discussing), at least.

Sure, HTML is bloated, as Alan pointed out. I don't care too much about
that, but others might. There are tools to remove the formatting junk. Just
as Info is an output format (Texinfo being the editing medium), so is HTML.

HTML is truly ubiquitous. In the form of XHTML (which is XML and is also
~HTML 4.0), it is easily manipulated by program, and there are many tools to
do that. There are tools to transform it to practically any output or
intermediate format one can imagine, and if some such tool doesn't exist, it
can be built using XML transformation tools such as XSLT and XQuery. Every
modern doc production system is now XML-based - and becoming increasingly
more so. Even authoring tools such as Framemaker now have XML as innards.
Even Microsoft Office is moving to XML.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that Texinfo should be XML-based or should be
sidestepped in favor of XML from the beginning. I'm saying that XHTML can be
a better output format than is Info, _and_ you can manipulate it better.
IOW, Texinfo -> some internal XML model -> XHTML. (The latter transformation
is XML to XML, from internal model to presentation format.)

Yes, I think it's not a bad idea at all. Bravo! The more I think about it,
the more I don't see why this shouldn't be done. (And a side effect might be
that Emacs would become (even) more XML savvy.)

Again, no flames please. I just wanted to voice my vote.

[I do also agree, BTW, with Alan and others who have said that we need not
do this just because we cannot escape colons for Info! We can add colon
escaping to Texinfo/Info separately. Moving from Info to XHTML is a separate
question, IMO.]