I don't know about back/forward, but the reason I think it wouldn't be right is because it would force the Elisp renderer to build the indices and things like that.
The representation we need should have all such "global processing" already performed, so the rendering is local. That argument seems very convincing. Maybe we could define a new format which would be Texinfo XML, plus indices and whatever else is useful to speed up access by Emacs. Would that be convenient? What data are needed for Emacs to work fast on the file? -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call