Re: A replacement for Info

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 12:33:58AM +0200, Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
> 
> 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.

Another useful information that is kept in the tree that is done from
the parsed Texinfo in perl is a reference to other elements of the tree.
For example, a @node has a reference to the following sectioning command
and vice-versa, an @end has a reference to the @-command that begun the
block, a @quotation with @author holds a list of references to those
commands, while the @author has a reference to the @titlepage or
@quotation.  Would this be doable in an sexpr?

As for the information that may be wanted in a renderer, looking at what
is available now, there is the index informations (index entries, merged
indices), informations on floats (for @listoffloats), informations on 
labels (@node, @anchor, @float with label) especially for internal
@*ref, a possibility to access the tree of some @-commands, like 
@copying, @documentdescription, @top, @settitle..., and some misc
informations, like the succession of @direntry and @dircategory, the
input file name.

-- 
Pat