Re: address@hidden: RE: cannot find :enable in Elisp manualindex]

[Richard Stallman]

    It seems to me that neither \: nor SGML entities are a solution.  Either
    one involves making normal characters special (\ or &#;), which will
    break lots of existing documents.  There are Texinfo documents which
    have the literal text "&123;" precisely to document whatever &123; is.

Are there info files that have constructs like &123; in the menu item
names?  That (and maybe xrefs) is where quoting is needed.

    Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how having some simple
    HTML-ish output would solve the problem either.  Even if we design and
    implement such a thing, Info output will still need to continue to exist
    for plenty of years to come, and therefore source documents could still
    not use : (or whatever) in node names.

Even if we avoid using colon in menu items for a few more years, until
we declare the old Info format obsolete, the plan can be a good one.
It could provide a lot of different benefits in addition to using
colons in menu names.

    For instance, we could have
    address@hidden address@hidden
    where xxxx are hex digits.

We can use that as the short-term solution for colons in menu names.
However, we should still consider moving to an HTML-based new Info
format, as a long-term plan to provide many new features.

    One more thought: someone going to the trouble of writing a whole new
    viewer might as well use TexinfoML XML for its input, it seems to me (as
    Juri wrote).

In principle, this might be just as good as using a subset of HTML.
However, in practice, using a subset of HTML would allow any browser
to display Info files.  Could TexinfoML XML do that?