Re: Info enhancements

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 10:45:49 -0600 (CST)
> From: Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden>
> 
>    IIRC, the stand-alone Info reader was fixed to prefer the reference
>    at point, if there is one, and otherwise try the reference that is
>    closest to point.
> 
> In my bug report to Juri I was not talking about references (@ref and
> the like), but about _menu entries_.  Juri talked about "references".
> Juri, is this really what you meant?  I actually made myself a mini
> .texi file to check whether there was a similar problem with
> references, but everything seemed to work OK.
> 
> Menu entries with the same name would give trouble for the `m'
> (Info-menu) command.

IIRC, the stand-alone reader handles this problems as well (by
preferring the menu entry that is closest to point).

>    > But we can remove such limitation by
>    > adding a new argument `nodename' to the `Info-follow-reference'.
> 
>    Please don't.  Let's not introduce yet another haphazard change into
>    the Info format.  As the case of the stand-alone reader shows, this
>    limitation can be lifted without any changes to the Info format per
>    se.
> 
> Either I misunderstand you, or you misunderstood Juri or I
> misunderstood Juri.  `Info-follow-reference' is a function in info.el.
> It has nothing to do with the Info format or formatting, it is a
> navigational function.

Same difference.  There's no need to do that, IMHO, so let's not.

Really, the only positive outcome of this longish thread is the
more-or-less widespread consensus that we should develop an XML-based
reader.  Could we please drop the (IMHO futile) attempts to ``fix''
the current Info readers by making them slicker than they were
designed to be?