On Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 08:29:19AM +0200, [email protected] wrote: > > https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Info-Format-Specification.html > > As a thought experiment: what would it take for that > reference above to (also) open a local info viewer? > > The technical part is easy: recognize the prefix and > substitute it. The exciting part is rather: we need some > rule set to "build" the URLs as the one above which is > sufficiently stable to build applications on top of that.
It's not possible to do reliably or simply. Here's an excerpt from a file in the Texinfo repository (TODO.HTML): It was also an issue as to how to get the manual name from a link. In recent Texinfo releases, links to other manuals are annotated with the "data-manual" attribute. This solves the problem of getting the manual name. Texinfo manuals are put on the web with a variety of URL formats and it is not possible to reliably get a manual name from a URL or even to tell if a URL is to a Texinfo manual or to some other webpapge. It's unlikely we could persuade everybody to change their URL formats to be something a browser could parse reliably to get the manual name. Here are some examples of URL's and the manual names: https://www.gnu.org/software/trans-coord/manual/cvs/html_node/ - "cvs" https://gmplib.org/manual/ - "gmp" http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/internals/ - "lilypond-internals" https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gfortran/ - "gfortran"
