lynx-dev documentation benefitting developers (was: lynx2.8.2dev.16)

[Klaus Weide]

On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Kim DeVaughn wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 08, 1999, Jacob Poon (address@hidden) said:
> |
> | >   3. Replaces any embedded control chars with something printable
> |
> | This may cause trouble with multibyte encoded characters.  UCS-2, UCS-4,
> | and UTF-16 are affected by it.  But since Lynx does not support these
> | encodings (yet), these problem are not pervalent.  Nevertheless, the
> | documentation should issue a warning to people who want to add support for
> | the encodings in question, or when using external editors that depends on
> | unsupported encodings.
> 
> From what I've seen of lynx's internals, supporting such multibyte char
> encodings would require huge changes in (most) all parts of the code.

You have to be careful to distinguish between multibyte encodings and
wide character representations.  UCS-2, UCS-4 are not multibyte encodings
in the terminology of mbrtowc() etc.

"Lynx does not support these encodings" isn't very relevant here, it is
too general.  They might well be supported as external representations
but still not be used in the HText structures.

> However, I'll add a comment about it in the cited code to that effect,
> in a cleanup patch that I'm working on.
> 
> I dunno the best place to document that "limitation" overall though ..
> .. perhaps in the README and/or ABOUT-NLS file(s).  Or maybe there
> should be some kind of INTERNALS file, for documenting such things
> (which would also include things about var/fn() naming conventions,
> macro usage (eg, FREE() vs. free()), "style, coding conventions, and
> the like).

Feel free to take the initiative to start one. :)

Also have a look at
   Linkname: C Programming Style in libwww
        URL: http://www.w3.org/Library/User/Style/

I regard some of that as still guiding Lynx, in a loose way.

Maybe somewhat relevant, long time ago I started docs/README.defines;
it seems that hasn't been "adopted" or kept updated (including by myself,
I have to admit).  I didn't invest the necessary time to make and keep it
relevant, or to advocate it to get "buy-in"...

     Klaus