Re: yelp tracker issue on Texinfo HTML documentation

[Gavin Smith]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2024 at 09:14:13AM -0800, Per Bothner wrote:
> On 12/24/24 8:35 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > I have raised an issue on the "yelp" bug tracker to contact
> > the yelp developers:
> > 
> > https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/yelp/-/issues/220
> > 
> > Please let us know if anybody knows any other way that we should get in
> > touch with them.  Also people may have other ideas to share on the best
> > way forward on the "HTML-Info" question.
> 
> I'm surprised you didn't mention the JavaScript info reader.
> in the js directory. It has no dependency on any particular
> browser, but should run fine in WebKitGTK.

I mentioned info.js already in TODO.HTML.

  However, this system is only appropriate for online manuals, not for
  locally installed manuals.  The reason for this is that it only handles
  one manual at a time and does not handle searching for a manual.

Basically embedding info.js is just an unnecessary complication.  Implementing
everything again is not such a big problem (and it should all be done
already - assuming the program compiles with recent WebKitGTK, which
I haven't checked).

> I think at some point I looked at the WebKitGTK-based info reader,
> but I don't remember how it compared. I think it had some niceties
> compared to the pure-js version, but not enough to justify
> a separate WebKitGTK code-base. It might be worthwhile for
> the js reader to have some hooks that could be used by Yelp/WebKitGtk.

I already have a sketchy understanding of how info.js actually
works - adding hooks for WebKitGTK could push it into the realms of
unmaintainability.

You may remember that there was a short-lived "qt-info" program
before webkitgtk-info that did embed info.js, using QtWebEngine
instead of WebKitGTK.  I seem to remember that this program
wasn't as far developed, though.

> If Yelp uses different keybindings and other UI that traditional info, it
> would be easy to modify js-info to match.
> 
> As a bonus for Yelp, js-info is not inherently restricted to
> texinfo output, but can be used for any html files that
> follow a reasonable set of conventions (which we should document).

Yes, and we should document these conventions also to avoid
breaking compatibility with new versions of Texinfo.