Re: Large SGML Cleanup

Excerpts from Josh Kupershmidt's message of mar nov 02 23:56:26 -0300 2010:
> [Resending without large attachment, looks like the previous attempt
> isn't going to make it]
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've gone through the SGML documentation, trying to push the output
> HTML towards HTML 4.01 compliance. By far the most common problem I
> found was incorrect nesting of <para> nodes, which results in invalid
> HTML.

I wonder if you're going to get stuck at some point due to invalid HTML
being output by the toolchain that cannot be fixed. For example, there
are <A> elements inside other <A> elements in history.html. How would
you fix that? There's also a systematic problem in bookindex.html
which is a generated file.

I wonder if it would be better to see about switching the toolchain. We
discussed jumping to XML; this was rejected in the past for no bigger
reason that not wanting to have to rename the files from .sgml to .xml.
Now that we're in Git, that's no longer a problem. If we can switch to
a better toolchain for producing the HTML, maybe these problems would go
away. (Of course, to be able to switch to XML we'd need to change a few
habits that no longer work such as using </> as closing tag).

Of course, switching to XML is going to meet a lot more resistance than
just committing these simple fixes to the SGML source.

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Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
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