Re: proposal for html manual cross links

> Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 14:09:29 +0100
> From: Dumas Patrice <[email protected]>
> 
> Here is an updated version of the html cross manual references proposal.

I hope that I understand this correctly: this proposal describes
transformation only for cross-references (as opposed for transforming
Texinfo into HTML in general).

First of all: why do you say above ``cross manual references''?
Aren't we going to produce references to the same manual in a way
that is identical to cross-manual references?

> @point       utf8 character 2217

Please say "Unicode character" instead of "utf8 character" throughout
this document.  0x2217 is the Unicode codepoint, while its UTF8
encoding is something very different.  "U+2217" is the accepted
shorthand for "Unicode codepoint hex 2217", so perhaps let's use that.

> Accented letters are transformed into their utf-8 equivalent character,
> if such a thing exists. If there are more than one possibility for the
> utf-8 character, which may happen for characters in the latin1 range  and
> in another range (@v{Z}, @v{s}, @ae{}...), the value not in the latin1 range
> should be choosen.

Why do you prefer the non-Latin1 alternative unconditionally?  Isn't
it better to let this be driven by @documentencoding?

> @(space) SPACE
> @(tab) SPACE
> @(newline) SPACE
> @* SPACE
> @! !
> @? ?
> @. .
> @: NOTHING
> @tie SPACE
> @equiv utf-8 character 2261
> @print -|
> @error error-->

Some characters are not allowed in file names on certain filesystems.
For example, `|', `>' and `?' are not allowed on Windows.  SPACE
sounds like not a good idea, either.  (But see below, where I comment
about 7-bit ASCII.)

> ``     "
> ''     "

Again, `"' is not allowed in file names on Windows.

> multiple spaces and tabs are transformed into just one space.
> letters and numbers, and ([A-Za-z0-9]) are not modified.
> spaces are converted into '-'.
> ascii 7 bit characters are transformed into _00xx where xx is the ascii
> character in hexadecimal. '_' is itself mapped to _005f.
> Other characters are transformed into _xxxx where xxxx is the utf-8
> code of the character in hexadecimal.
> The letters in hexadecimal should be in lower case.

It is not clear whether these rules are applied recursively or not.
For example, am I to understand that multiple spaces are transformed
like this:

   SPACE SPACE SPACE -> SPACE -> _0020

or like this:

   SPACE SPACE SPACE -> SPACE

?  In other words, will we have a file name with spaces in it or not?

"ascii 7 bit" is a bit vague; how about mentioning the precise range
of ASCII codepoints of characters that are transformed into _00xx
notation?

It is not clear what to do with 8-bit single-byte characters, in case
the Texinfo source includes them.  If you mean that we should convert
them to Unicode, we should specify how.

> In the case of multiple nodes with the same target name, the software should
> warn the user, and it is only required that the target leads to one of
> these nodes. Thus some nodes may not be attainable.

Why not do what we do in the current code?  Leaving nodes unreachable
is not a good idea, IMHO.
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