Re: html cross refs proposal

(Alper: please see my note at the end.)

    <srcdir>/.texinfo_manuals/, 

By <srcdir> you mean the directory where the top-level input file was
located?  I guess that is good.  I'm not sure if . should be searched
first by default.

Seems to me we need a search path environment variable, too, with the
given directory list as the default value if it's not set.

    ~/.texinfo_manuals/, SYSCONFDIR/texinfo_manuals/,
    DATADIR/texinfo/texinfo_manuals/

I do not like the name "texinfo_manuals", but we can fiddle with it
later.

    The following @ commands are not allowed (ie the resulting file name is
    unspecified):

And a diagnostic (warning, probably) is given.

    in normal form C.

"normalization" not "normal".  And give the url ...

    For example '@TeX{a text}' leads to 'TeX a text'. 

No.  @TeX{a text} is an error.  (I know makeinfo does not generate an
error for it right now, but it's still erroneous.)

The Texinfo manual explicitly says when arguments to commands are
permitted.  If not stated, arguments are not allowed.

For our purposes here, "@samp{a text} leads to `a text'" would be a
better example.

    @equiv utf-8 character 2261

Best to write "U+2261".  We don't need to specify utf-8, we want to use
the generic Unicode code point value, not the bit pattern in any given
representation.

    Non 7 bit characters are transformed into the unicode corresponding 
    character in normalization form C. 

And this in turn depends on the document encoding ... And the foreign
manual might use a different encoding ... I think there could be a
difficulty here, but I'm not concerned at the moment.


Notwithstanding the above comments, this looks good to me.  I think the
next step will be for us to try to implement it, and for me to include
the specification in the Texinfo manual.

We're closing in on the next Texinfo release (4.7).  I think we can try
to implement the common parts of this for that -- that is, no 8-bit
expansion, no @-command expansion, no texinfo_manuals external
directories (we've been living without them so far, one more release
won't hurt, and they are a big can of worms).  The rest is, I think,
reasonably straightforward and close to what we are doing now.

Alper, can you add it to your todo list?  It's a big item, I know :).

Thanks,
karl
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