On 8/3/22 15:15, Patrice Dumas wrote:
In any case, it does not mean that using another encoding is fragile nor
dangerous. There is a list of supported encodings in the Texinfo
manual
https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/_0040documentencoding.html
I think that we support them well, in a robust way in texi2any. And if
it is not the case, it should be a bug. We always emit a charset
information, too.
The question is output encodings for html (and xhtml and epub), and how well
browsers and others html-reading programs handle random "legacy" output
encodings.
Note the term "legacy" encoding (as used in W3C standards). That implies
that new html files should avoid using these encodings.
I think that we should support setting the output encoding explictly to
a Texinfo supported encoding for a long time, even it UTF-8 becomes the
default output encoding for HTML.
Why? Is this useful for anything?
I do not imagine dropping that feature anytime soon.
Why not? "We have done so in the past" isn't really a reason.
Is there any consumer of texi2any-procused html files that would
break if the output encoding changed to utf8 only? I guess hypothetically
that might be the case, but I don't see why why should support it.
At the very least the default output should be utf8. If the interest of
simplified code and documentation it makes sense to just remove the
support for other encodings - it is useless crud.
Certainly if we have to add a new option/switch to support overriding the
default output encoding then it is not worth it. Just switch the output
to utf8, change documentation, and rip out the old code.
--
--Per Bothner
[email protected] http://per.bothner.com/
