Re: texi2html web page, second attempt

[John Mandereau]

Le 13/06/2009 20:14, Graham Percival a écrit : 
> To counter-act the "texi2html looks boring" idea, here's a new
> version:
> http://percival-music.ca/blogfiles/out/lilypond-general_1.html

You made the proof of concept of using texi2html to write a website in
Texinfo; this is nice and promising, I'm now almost convinced that we
could adopt this technical design.  However, I'm sure I want to update
the translation infrastructure first, as it will be reused in the
website if we adopt this design: remember that it's about translating
node names and section titles directly in the translated files, so it
would well take between 10 and 15 hours to hack the scripts and apply
and check the changes to existing translations.


> 2)  Apologies to people who worked on the perl texinfo init file
> for the docs.  I hacked it up horribly to get this version.  

You could thank them too :-D


> - also, if we end up going this route, somebody (I'm willing to do
>   it, although I wouldn't mind delegating this :)  needs to make
>   the nagivation menu show the current subsections in a second
>   list.  (like the current webpage)
>   

This is possible, but I don't know how much Perl hacking it requires. It
would be nice to generate the (sub)TOC as a drop-down menu activated by
mouse hover/click BTW.


> - we also probably want to remove the <h1>section-name</h1> from
>   the page.  Not a big deal.

... or using the node names for links (cross-references) and menus, and
reuse current web site <h1> title as the section name in Texinfo sources
so we still have the same <h1> on the final HTML page.



> 3)  Ok, so why do I want to use texinfo so much?
> - makes pdfs+info.  I personally *never* use those formats, but I
>   know that some people still use them.  IMO, if we're going to
>   support those formats for the manuals, we should support them
>   for the information that's on the website.
>   

I'm not so enthusiast for a single huge PDF that contains so much
heterogenous kinds of information. Anyway, that's not a big deal, as
it's possible to have several master Texinfo files, with each being used
to produce one PDF document. Of course, HTML output has a much higher
priority.


> - we all know texinfo.  It's easy to fix small mistakes in it.  If
>   we go this route, I can have the content of the new website done
>   by the end of this weekend.  Then we just need to adjust the
>   style (tweak the init file, write a CSS, maybe make new images,
>   etc).  Oh, and adjusting the translation stuff[*].

If I may add an advantage of Texinfo over HTML, it is more concise and
faster to type.

Happy Texinfo/Perl/HTML hacking,
John