Re: Ada Reference Manual 2012 in info format

[Oliver Kleinke <oliver.kleinke@c-01a.de>]

Am Thu, 10 May 2012 11:11:25 +0100
schrieb Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>:

> > A major problem of the formatter/RM sources is that they only
> > provide partial semantic information about the contents, that IS
> > 1995-style.
> 
> What, exactly, is missing? Can you give an example?

I'll provide one example:

when ARM_Output.Small =>
   if Indent = 0 then
      return "Small";
   elsif Indent = 1 then
      return "Notes";
   elsif Indent = 2 then
      return "Annotations";

As you can easily see the two style attributes 'Small' (paragraph/header
style) and Indent (paragraph indentation) are used to determine the
semantics of the paragraph's contents. So if you are a bright guy,
you'll figure out what's bad about it.

More semantic markup would also facilitate the extraction of information
from the RM, e.g. to feed the data into an IDE (Manuel Collado pointed
that out).


> In Randy's defense, any more sophisticated access would require a hole
> in his firewall.

lol, k

> > Providing a modern HTML version does not exclude the possibility to
> > provide a more 'compatible' version, 
> 
> You have yet to define what you mean by either "modern" or
> "compatible", either by example or description.

For instance the paragraphs have no anchors, thus the possibility of
deep-linking is limited. The Index has neither anchors for the letters
nor links to them at the top. I can think of a lot more.

> It's getting hard to be patient!

The limits of your imagination are none of my concerns.

> > so don't be so obstinate. :-)
> 
> I'm seeing far more obstinate behavior from you than from Randy.

Is that so?