Re: A replacement for Info

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès)
() Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:48:17 +0200

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

   Honestly, with Guile 2, translating from XML to SXML boils down to
   calling ‘xml->sxml’, which is easy enough.

I didn't want to overstate the case, but what you say is true enough.

   If the XML backend didn’t already exist, I would suggest using a
   custom sexp-based format instead, though.  That would be easier than
   SXML for elisp, which doesn’t have tools like sxml-match.

What is ‘sxml-match’ and how would a renderer use it?

Anyway, some custom is required; SXML alone is insufficient.  I think
full custom is not indicated, however; SXML is fine for some parts.

Anyone interested in looking over a full-custom sexp-based document
extraction / interpolation system (that feeds makeinfo), please see:

 http://www.gnuvola.org/software/guile-baux/

To play, install Guile (1.8.7 seems ok) and do:

 git clone http://www.gnuvola.org/software/guile-baux.git
 cd guile-baux
 make

then look at doc/snippets, which is a "texinfo snippet archive".  Its
format is undocumented, but you can get a rough idea by looking at the
documentation for module ‘(guile-baux ts-base)’, which is the one that
actually slides the sexps to/from disk.

Next, modify the comment preceding some module's exported procedure and
invoke make again, to trace the change propagation (not only to snippets
but also beyond, to guile-baux.info).

To get back on topic, the points i wish to demonstrate are: (a) indexing
requires integers; (b) full-custom requires more code than some-custom;
(c) interpolation and rendering have similar data access patterns and
thus similar data format requirements (IMHO, one is a special case of
the other, but i'm not sure which is which!).

--
Thien-Thi Nguyen ..................................... GPG key: 4C807502
.                  NB: ttn at glug dot org is not me                   .
.                 (and has not been since 2007 or so)                  .
.                        ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES                         .
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