Re: problematic node name characters

[Karl Berry]

    > I don't foresee us designing and implementing the
    > arbitrary-chars-in-node-names-and-elsewhere feature any time soon.

    Maybe.

I have felt stymied about it because I don't see how to devise something
that devolves gracefully with old (current) readers.  Which is what most
people will continue to use for years and years after the feature is
introduced, given the way the world has turned out.

For example, it's easy to say an Info file could contain
Node: address@hidden name="(arbitrary)nodename,::.chars"address@hidden, ...
(Rough idea, obviously lots of details skipped.)

And I don't imagine it's all that hard to implement in the readers,
either.  The problem is that old readers will consider it syntactically
invalid and have no way to display the file at all.


So, the next step is that a "reduced" name could be written in the
present format for old readers, as in:

Node: arbitrarynodenamechars, ...

Followed by a construct like the above, that the new readers can
understand, like (just for example):
address@hidden node="(arbitrary)nodename,::.chars", ... address@hidden,

The old readers will consider it to be (ugly) text to display, but at
least the real content of the document would still be viewable.


I'm not very happy with it ... 

karl