> Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 18:50:07 +0100
> From: Dave Love <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> EZ> Sorry, I don't understand what do you mean by link
> EZ> meta-information.
>
> The <link> elements record the Texinfo structure and allow a `user
> agent' to navigate without reading the text. Without that you can't
> use the HTML as a decent replacement for info, particularly for things
> like finding and processing indexes. (Currently you can probably only
> use the information in W3 with a bit more hacking, but probably you
> could provide such features in other browsers using ECMAscript or Java
> -- I don't know.
Do you know any browser that supports <link>? From what I could
gather, the more advanced features of <link> are not uniformly
available. How exactly do you intend to use <link> to solve the
problems I mentioned?
> EZ> The names themselves were not that bad (except for the 8+3 DOS
> EZ> names, but that could be solved).
>
> I think imposing such a limit here would be unreasonable -- it would
> mean you couldn't do the job properly as far as I can see.
I don't think so. But that's not an important issue.
> EZ> The problem was how do you compute a reference to another HTML
> EZ> file that was also split: you don't know the name of the specific
> EZ> sub-file where the referenced node lives in the other document,
>
> You do if you assume that the other file was generated with the same
> conventions
Sorry, I'm missing something here.
Let's say you have an @xref{Files, , How to work with files, emacs,
The GNU Emacs Manual}. How will you know what is the file name where
the node "Files" will reside after `emacs.html' is split into several
files? For that matter, how do you know if it *was* split in the
first place, or whether it was split by chapters or by sections? Even
if you do know how it was split, how can you know what file name was
that node put on, unless you call the the files by the name of the
node, like in `emacs_Files.html'?
> EZ> and HTML files lack tag tables that remove this problem in Info.
>
> With a convention for processing <link> and/or <meta> information, you
> could provide that, but I don't see why you need it if URLs reflect
> node names.
So it seems like you do want the `emacs_Files.html' method. That
doesn't seem like a good idea for some annoying practical purposes.
For example, what do you do with punctuation (even NT doesn't allow
`?' and `*' in file names)?
And how exactly can <link> help here?
