Transforming XML or other intermediate representation of Texinfo; category system

[Robert Dodier]

Hi, I hope all is well with you-all.

Some time ago I cooked up a category system for Maxima. That was a
success in the sense that it works as intended. You can see a random
example: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/docs/manual/maxima_33.html Just
scroll down a bit and look for "Categories: ...". Categories are the
same as the tags that get stuck on, e.g., bug reports or Stackoverflow
posts, etc. etc.

The bad news is that it's implemented as a terrible conglomeration of
bash scripting and regex matching. I am thinking about ways to make it
less terrible.

First of all, am I reinventing a wheel here? Is there already an
implementation of a category system for Texinfo? There wasn't when I
got started but that was a long time (more than 10 years) ago. I
searched again today but didn't find anything.

Assuming there isn't such a system already, I am thinking a cleaner
way to implement it would be to generate an intermediate
representation of Texinfo documents, do some transformations on it,
and then generate the output (info, html, pdf). Is it possible to use
XML as an intermediate representation? I know that one can generate
XML via --xml -- the crucial step would be to be able to input XML as
well. Is it possible for makeinfo to read XML as input?

Failing that, is there any other structured intermediate
representation (i.e., can be either output or input) of Texinfo
documents?

Thanks for any information, I appreciate your help.

Robert Dodier