[issue37298] IDLE: Revise html to tkinker converter for help.html

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> added the comment:

Thank you for the research, including the crucial commit!  What I understand from the quotes:

1. Sphinx 2 writes HTML5 by default.  The html5 writers always writes paragraphs because they are required by the xhtml used by html5.

2. Firefox, for instance, displays the result the same as before either because it either has the logic to avoid extra blank lines when reading html5 or because this is taken care of by revised css (this is unclear from the quotes). 

To deal with html5, our converter would have to ignore the <p>s that the html4 writer omitted, by adding logic for the cases used in idle.rst.  Not fun.

Reading the commit (3rd line) revealed a new sphinx configuration option: html4_writer, defaulting to False.  When I switched from building html with my 3.6 install with sphinx 1.8.1 to 3.7 with 2.something, and added "-D html4_writer=1" to a direct call of sphinx-build, I indeed got html without added <p>s.  The only different was the irrelevant omission of '\n' between list item header and text in the html file.  Example:
  -<dt>New File</dt>
  -<dd>Create a new file editing window.</dd>
  +<dt>New File</dt><dd>Create a new file editing window.</dd>

Setting SPHINXOPTS should work when using 'Doc/make.bat html'.  I will prepare a PR documenting our parser requirement and include the neutral html changes.

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<https://bugs.python.org/issue37298>
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