Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: texmacs installation problem

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> > I think that improving the Html output filter in such a way that
> > it is good enough for converting our webpages is a matter of a few days.
> > So this can be done shortly after the release of version 1.0.1.
> 
> I am quite unsure about that. Esp., considering that I would probably
> use that occasion to introduce commodity SXML code into TeXmacs.

Yes, but if one always wants more and more, then one does nothing.
We sometimes have to accept loosing a bit of time in order to
implement something which does not have a full generality.
Implementing a good Html filter falls into this category:
having a complete set of XML/SGML tools might inded make it
much easier to implement such a filter. But writing these tools
would require a lot of time and thought. In the meantime,
we would not have a good Html filter. Now having a good Html
filter will make us gain a lot of time when restructuring
the web site. So writing a good Html filter first will actually
make us win time, even though it may not be a technically
ideal solution at the end.

> I had a look at it. It is quite easy to offer a half-assed SXML
> implementation (that is what I am hacking with), but the full thing is
> really non-trivial.

Yes and because it is non trivial, it is good to obtain
some experience first by implementing an Html filter.

> I believe I have a bit of experience know in
> document conversion (thought I have not studied your html conversion
> code yet), and I tend to think we should be using SXSLT for most of
> the logic.

Since you do not have the experience... same conclusion.

> Generally, the editor give a lot of freedom to the user in producing
> documents with improper (or simply surprising) structure. That makes
> creating robust conversion filters non-trivial. Even for regular
> documents, the document/concat based structures are generally not
> trivial to handle, esp. since in many case the document may contain
> improper block/inline/block structure nesting without it causing
> obvious problems to the user.

Yes, and you will not solve this problem in a few days.

> I am thinking to make the editor more restrictive in producing such
> incorrect structures. That is not going to be easy for copy-paste
> operations, but for normal input operations I believe that would not
> be difficult. You could get some inspiration on that matter by using
> Amaya.

I already know what should be done here and I explained part of that
before on this mailing list. However, it will require a month or so
to implement that.

> > I would like things to change as follows:
> > 
> >   * Redesign of the webpages in TeXmacs format.
> >   * Writing a filter for conversion to Html.
> >   * Writing a meta-filter for converting the whole site.
> >   * Updating the web-site using the meta-filter by CVS on savannah
> >     for each new release.
> >   * Mirroring the web pages on www.texmacs.org
> > 
> > This should not take too much time so it might be ready sometime
> > during the winter.
> 
> Then maybe you could write it out (with afferent comments) on the task
> manager...
> 
> It has a nice "task depends on task" feature. Kind of what allows you
> to produce those nice GANTT charts managers are so fond of ;-)

Do we have that on Savannah?