Re: A replacement for Info

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
() Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:51:20 -0400

       Perhaps people resist XML, no matter its viability, because it is ugly.

   Karl's talking about using it as an output format, not to write by hand.

Yes, i understand.  Anyway, one program(mer)'s output is another's
input.  I use the word "ugly" also from the pov of a programmer who
enjoys, but dislikes being limited to, list and string processing.
Perhaps better would have been "impoverished".

       It would be cool if Texinfo were able to produce SXML, a format
       directly translatable to/from XML, directly.

   Since we like Lisp, SXML might be better than XML.  Is there a free
   converter between XML and SXML?  I would guess there is.

There are several.  Guile can do it directly (by loading some modules).
Emacs does something similar (building an internal tree) that is not too
far from "proper SXML".

   The question is, can Emacs render the XML or SXML output
   that we would get from our manuals?  Is that feasible?

I think so.

However, as mentioned in another post, whatever format we choose should
support indexing and incremental loading (similar to the way Emacs keeps
track of and displays docstrings).  With that in mind, i realize now
that SXML alone is unsuitable since it doesn't even support the integer
data type!  (I can't imagine building an index w/o integers.)  Maybe i'm
just ignorant -- XML experts please correct me if i'm missing something.

Ideally, if i were to write a renderer, i would want five sections in
the file: MAGIC, OPTIONS, METADATA, INDEX, DATA.  In this layout, SXML
could work fine for DATA.  The other sections require numbers.

Less than ideal, but still feasible, is to force-fit SXML to represent
all those sections.  Each renderer must now call ‘string-to-number’,
though (in addition to ‘read’), which is simply shake-your-head uncool.

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen ..................................... GPG key: 4C807502
.                  NB: ttn at glug dot org is not me                   .
.                 (and has not been since 2007 or so)                  .
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