Re: @table without @item

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 04:09:10PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
> Patrice,
> 
> Regarding the @table without @item craziness.
> 
> I tried various combinations of
> @table @w  or  @table @asis
> and
> @item @w{}  or @item @asis{}
> 
> The marker is indeed empty, and it works ok in Info and HTML as far as I
> can see, but there is extra vertical blank space in TeX, which is not
> desirable (and not surprising).
> 
> It shouldn't be too hard to eliminate that unwanted space with an empty
> marker.  On the other hand, I don't really see a reason not to use
> @quotation.  It seems better to me in every way for the actual use in
> the gdb manual.
> 
> Wdyt?

I agree that indeed, a @quotation is what is best, for now.  So, I 
think that either they should bear with the warnings, or we could add 
another @-command like that indents but do not narrow the right margin, 
nor do anything special with @author.  Could be named @passage, or
@indentedblock @blockindent... 

Also, I think that the right margin should be narrower in Info too 
for @quotation.  In my testings, Firefox narrow the right margin 
with <blockquote>.

There is an argument for having a specific block environment, from
wikipedia:

 "The non-semantic use of the blockquote element purely to indent text is
 deprecated by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in the current (1999)
 HTML 4.01 Specification,[2] which is also the basis for XHTML 1.0. The
 preferred approach is the use of CSS."

This means that there is certainly a need for such a construct and that 
it should not be <blockquote>.

-- 
Pat