[tz] TZ file comments UTF-8? Bastardized HTML?

Steffen Daode Nurpmeso sdaoden at gmail.com
Mon Jan 14 18:42:03 UTC 2013


Ian Abbott <abbotti at mev.co.uk> wrote:
 |On 2013-01-12 21:04, Steffen Daode Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
 |>
 |>|The HTML markup has bothered me, too; I have found it more
 |>|distracting than useful.  URLs themselves should be fine,
 |>|but the <a href='...'> business gets in the way.
 |>
 |> How about turning over to a simple generic approach, as in
 |>
 |>    L<http://www.url1.com>
 |>    and/or
 |>    L<Some descriptive text><http://www.url2.com>
 |
 |Do we really have a use for post-processing the comments into another 
 |document format?  I think it's fine just to keep the comments in the 
 |files readable by humans (which is where the HTML stuff currently gets 
 |in the way).

Well it seems that the possibility to use HTML for easier
previewing with hyperlink support is desired, but one must
uncomment one line to get at this feature, and from my memory
point of view it seems that not few people use it.
My thought was just to make this an automatic, documented and
regular feature.

And just as Russ Allbery pointed out, that could very easily be
extended - almost strictly on the script side - to support a lot
of output formats, of which PDF is possibly the most interesting.
I.e., with an index and TOC (=headX lines needed) and working
hyperlinks etc.
I didn't really think of that on saturday, but it's surely of
interest .. once available, i'm pretty sure.

 |Some consistency would be nice though.  Some URLs are just written 
 |as-is, some are enclosed in angle brackets, and most currently get the 
 |HTML href treatment.  I think we only really need to distinguish between 
 |named links and unnamed links, and if the comments are only intended to 
 |be processed by humans, there is no need to mark-up the "name" part of 
 |the link specially.
 |
 |For human-only rendering of links, perhaps stick with plain links 
 |enclosed in angle brackets, and for named links just enclose the 
 |reference in angle brackets and parentheses after the link name.

Yes i know there are editors out there which get this kind of URL
right (well, how do [i/]they get [t]here?), but mine doesn't.
Also using a - savage but - command syntax allows automatic
classification of URL content, etc. and of course.

Btw. i usually have max. 3 minutes CPU time wasted after an entire
week of work (unless foldmarks were used to excessively), and
i could almost bike-shed the energy required for that.  At least
in the summertime.  Not tz-related, however.

--steffen



More information about the tz mailing list