[DOC-SIG] Python Library Reference in new HTML form

[Fred L. Drake]

Laurence Tratt writes:
 > Um, it's Acorn RISC OS, and if you've actually heard of it, I'd be 

  I have, but I've never had a chance to use it.

 > Yes, but I find it's annoying to have to wade through things to get 
 > to what I want when really I want a front page where I can click on 

  Editor-based help can be a big plus, so it makes a lot of sense to
have a new conversion to do that.
  With the coming release, the Module Index is directly addressable by 
name, no "node####.html" cruft!  That makes it bookmarkable, so
eliminates a least having to wade through the Table of Contents.  It's 
also a lot shorter, so it loads faster!

 > > I have mixed feelings about extensive links, but a lot of that has
 > > to do with the aweful presentation of web browsers.
 > 
 > Well, I've kept to a fairly small subset of HTML. There's tables in 
 > there (obviously), but that's as difficult as it gets. There's no 

  I wasn't thinking so much of over-use of presentation markup as that 
links are always represented the same way (color change, maybe an
underline...); having a bunch of colored links in the text makes it
hard to read.  I'd love to be able to have "implied" links to modules, 
functions, methods, etc., that didn't change color, but that were hot
none-the-less.  Not hard to do with CSS, but that's not supported in
enough browsers yet to rely on it.

 > Hmmm, you should see the regular expression code I've got to do 
 > links. It's not very long, perhaps 3 or 4Kb, but already 

  Hm.. perhaps I shouldn't see it!

 > > more usable SGML from them.  The intention of the SGML conversion
 > > project is to move toward SGML for the official documentation sources.
...
 > Could you explain this a little more? I'm guessing that at the moment 
 > you're updating the LaTeX docs and once you've got those stable 
 > you'll convert them all to SGML, and use those as the base 

  That's correct.

 > Good. How much has been updated since the last release?

  From the standpoint of the markup, quite a bit.  Way more if you're
still relying on 1.5b2.  There's only a limited change in the
content.  Most of the markup changes are to take advantage of the
newer markup I've defined, shift the whole mess to a more modern LaTeX 
(version 2e instead of 2.09), and improve the general consistency of
the markup.
  The drive behind releasing it at this point it that I've promised it 
to the people who wanted a LaTeX source release.  Most of those
requests really just want it on A4 paper.  (Maybe I should just
provide a PostScript version formatted for A4?)


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive    Reston, VA  20191

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