Maxim,

On 2026-08-17 09:28 +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:
> I'd like to bring to attention that the current HTML source for SRFI
> makes it difficult to transliterate into something else, because of the
> HTML format itself and also because of slight HTML variations in the
> various SRFI documents.
>
> It'd be very useful to have a more easily parsed/well defined source
> format; Texinfo ships with a tool to convert it to HTML (along Info,
> PDF, etc), so perhaps it could be one option to consider.

You could just as well recommend a specific version of HTML (preferably
without dynamic elements).  XHTML and HTML 4.01 are well-defined,
and probably easier to parse than most of the manpage or "quick"
documentation formats out there.  But SRFIs authors basically use what
they want, and, with the unbounded expansion of WHATWG HTML, some of
them want plenty.  This is an issue with a large social component,
in other words.

After doing R7RS small in both Texinfo and DocBook, I personally believe
Texinfo is the worse of the two, when it comes to describing documents.
Its tree-structuring is weak, compared to the XML format.  (texi2any
does the best it can, but it’s pretty hard to translate texinfo
to *good* XML, for example.)  Texinfo is OK — it’s an incremental
improvement on the old troff macros — but it is not much of a semantic
format, and it’s certainly not the panacea some GNU folks seem to
believe it is.

Lest you think I only have complaints about Texinfo, I’ll add that
HTML is also inadequate for describing SRFIs and other technical
documents.  (Granted that WHATWG HTML may eventually be adequate for
all human purposes, but at that point no human will understand it.)
The traditional, well-supported set of HTML technical elements (dfn,
var, code, etc.) is far too limited.

I agree with you that it would be nice if SRFIs could be provided in
some well-defined, easily grokked format.  It would be a major change
to the SRFI process to require authors to use such a format (instead of
the current recommendation of well-formed HTML), but maybe an archive
of SRFI documents in FORMAT could be built up over time.  (Some authors
— the ones who want very specific formatting and their own favorite
font — may not like this.  So I would probably get permission first.)

--
Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe  <xxxxxx@sigwinch.xyz>