[help-texinfo] Re: texinfo.xsl not working

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

"R. Mattes" <address@hidden> writes:

> [...]
>
> Well, as i said: footnote handling would be a good first candidate.
> Indexing and crossreferences as well.

Now we are talking about XSL formatting?  To be honest, I don't
consider it a significant backend yet.  We still lack a good free
XSL processor, and last time I checked, development was very slow.

> I usually prefer "chunked" output so larger manuals don't kill my
> browser.

Now we are talking about HTML output of makeinfo?

> I'm not too happy with the xml current output: i'd expect an
> encoding attribute in the xml declaration (or, even better, a
> commandline switch to configure the encoding attribute). I really
> don't think there's a place for all theses special entities that
> duplicate characters easily available in ISO-8859-1 and Unicode.

All this is not necessary in my opinion, because UTF-8 is the
default with makeinfo's ASCII being a real subset.  Besides, the XML
output is not intended for human eyes and XML parsers don't care at
all.

> [...] What i really need to find out is whether the XML output
> looses information that's present in the original texinfo file.

Karl mentioned missing tags; there are a few, but they are minor.
This behaviour is not intended, however, the following is (it has
been discussed here, though):

Conditionals (@iftex etc) are lost if they didn't match.  This is a
problem because XML output can be used for any medium, so the
filtering should take place while processing the XML, not earlier.

Some text is generated by makeinfo ("See ...") although it doesn't
appear in the Texinfo source.  If you want to have a different text
(e.g. "Have a look at ...") you have to do *very* awkward things,
and it may break.

Some Texinfo tag groups (e.g. definition tags and cross reference
tags) lead to the same XML element, and any information about the
original is lost.

Tschö,
Torsten.

-- 
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus