Re: Arbritary characters (like colons) in node names (proposal)

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 7:46 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Backwards compatibility:
>>
>> These would not work in old browsers, but references like these don't
>> work any way.
>
> They don't work as references, but they are still readable.  Your
> suggestion, which uses control characters, will require the Info
> readers to remove them from what is displayed, otherwise the text will
> look garbled on display.  Perhaps using ASCII characters for quoting
> will ease the compatibility problems during the transition period.
>
If (non-control) ASCII characters are used for quoting/escaping, what
would this look like? There may be some already-existing manual which
uses a node name which could be interpreted as using these escape
sequences.

I understand that this would look quite garbled, so here is another suggestion:

q1 = ^?
q2 = ^?
q3 = ^?
q4 = ^?
q5 = (
q6 = )^?
q7 = ^?

(BTW now I look it again I see I used (,) where I meant {,} in q3 and q4 above.)

I.e., no quoting of file names at all, and quoting node names in ^?
(0xFF) when they contain forbidden characters. I don't think this
looks too bad.

E.g.,
"File: quoting.info, Node: Top, Prev: Normal 1, Next: ^?std::cout^?,
Up: Normal 2"

for a node line.

(I also found with testing that null bytes (^@) don't work well in
node lines, e.g. a node line like

"File: quoting.info, Node: Top, Prev: Normal 1, Next:
address@hidden::address@hidden, Up: Normal 2"

the Prev reference would be seen, but the Up wouldn't.)

> Also, since technically control characters are allowed in an Info
> file, you will have to come up with a scheme to produce literal 
> address@hidden(
> etc. sequences as well.

I expect there aren't many files which want to present control
characters by placing the character in the file. There are some cases
when it won't work (the ^_ node separator for example). When this
works I think it is mainly by accident.