Re: [GSoC] Proposal for JavaScript for info-style navigation.

[Per Bothner]

On 03/30/2017 03:40 PM, Mathieu Lirzin wrote:

> Per Bothner <address@hidden> writes:
> > While I re-emphasize this is my personal roadmap of how I think texinfo should
> > evolve (not everyone agrees ...), I think there is general agreement of the
> > value of a nice JavaScript-based UI for texinfo/html documents.
>
> Yes, that was my understanding.  I guess the replacement of the info
> format with hinfo and the use of epub for packaging it are the more
> controversial propositions?

I'm guessing, but I can't speak for anyone else.

> If I remember past discussion on this ML there was a disagreement
> regarding wether HTML export should use HTML4 or HTML5 standard (the
> later would help manipulating the DOM with Javascript) but since the
> goal is to use a HTML5 compatible format for the xhtml output.  I guess
> this is not a controversy anymore.

I'm not sure xhtml output is the best way to go.  I suspect the best is
"polyglot" output, with ".html" extension, valid as html, and well-formed as 
xml.
("Well-formed" and "valid" are technical XML terms.)

One point that I didn't realize in the earlier discussion
(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2016-02/msg00056.html):
The form <a name="LABEL"> is not "deprecated" in HTML5 - it is not
valid HTML5 at all.  While using id="LABEL" is valid in both html4 and html5.

Which IMO makes using id attributes a no-brainer.

> What are the known controversial parts of your personnal roadmap?

Not sure.  Probably dropping info format.  But let's focus on html format.

> > Do you know Perl?  Are you comfortable making changes to the makeinfo source,
> > which is mostly Perl?  It not necessary, and it may actually be an unwise
> > distraction from focusing on the JavaScript, just using the existing kawa.epub.
> > However, the way kawa.epub is built by first translating to DocBook isn't
> > really satisfactory, so a some point we want to use makeinfo's html output
> > directly, which means cleaning up and enhancing the the latter,
>
> I have some basic Perl knowledge, however modifying the makeinfo source
> would require a deep study of the AST structure and the output
> generation mechanism before being able to actually work on it (I would
> estimate the effort to 2~3 weeks).  If the Javascript implementation
> goes well, I can definitely spend some time on the html/xhtml5 output.

We do have another student who expressed interest in the "improve makeinfo"
aspect.  It's likely texinfo will only get funding for a single GSoC
student - but if there are extras, and we have two strong proposals, we
might talk the GNU GSoC people into giving texinfo one more, as we "gave
back" a slot last year.
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/