Maxim,

On 2026-08-18 11:01 +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote:
> It'd be nice if there was a requirement for authors to stick to what's
> used in the HTML SRFI document template; but yeah with HTML being very
> large and flexibly there's always going to be some wiggle room [...]

I wouldn’t mind some stricter limitations on SRFI HTML, myself.  In
general SRFI authors seem to use fairly simply code, but, for the
purposes of long-term preservation, a well-defined format might help.
(I again mourn the fact that WHATWG HTML cannot really be said to be
stable or well-defined.)

> I believe the strength of Texinfo lies not in its data representation
> but in the existing tooling around it that allows generating high
> quality documents in various formats, such as PDF or HTML, along Info,
> which is pretty handy with automatically handling indexing of procedures
> (as long as they are declared as such) and is still very usable even
> from a terminal emulator, if you must (I'd argue more than an HTML page
> thanks to the keyboard-based navigation and indices).

I use terminals for reading documentation, so feel free to write my
opinions off as grumpy hacker-talk. :-)

There is indeed a lot of Texinfo tooling — for now.  What counts in the
long run (decades, centuries, and so on) will be clarity of intention,
I believe.  The idea of semantic markup has been drowned in a sea of
lightweight languages, but I still think it’s a good one.  DocBook 5
isn’t perfect, by any means, and the toolchains are sadly bitrotten.
It does, however, describe the semantics of a technical document in a
way that is relatively clear even if you don’t have access to the
schema.  (And, unlike with Texinfo, LaTeX, mdocml, Scribble, Markdown,
etc., etc., there *is* a schema.  I have yet to see anything like a
Texinfo validator.)

But I will lay off the preaching.  To each his own.

I will add (grumpily) that there is a long history of GNU adherents
attempting to foist Texinfo on the rest of the world.  It is not a bad
format, but it is not all that is sometimes claimed.

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