[Doc-SIG] compact HTML output from Docutils

[Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)]

Of course, this is a doomed excercise (doomed, I tell you), but a brave
one nonetheless...

David Goodger wrote:
> I'd appreciate feedback, especially from people using different
> browsers (I've checked IE and Mozilla on both MacOS & Win2K, and
> Netscape 4 & 6 on MacOS).  Please browse the following files:

Hmm - well, I'll try to remember to look at the pages with Opera and
Galeon on Debian some evening (at home).

> - http://docutils.sf.net/tools/test.html
> - http://docutils.sf.net/spec/pep-0287.html
> - http://docutils.sf.net/spec/pep-0000.html
>
> Is the above approach correct?  Does the generated HTML come out
> right?  Should the compact output be optional (i.e. should there be an
> option to turn it off)?  Any suggestions?

The last two look very good to me (using IE 5.50 on Windows/NT). In
particular, I think that the handling of list spacing in the second
looks good.

The first exposes some niggles (well, hardly surprising):

* In "Bullet Lists", and the other examples with sublists, the
  gap around each internal list seems a bit big. This is a minor
  grumble as it is plainly difficult to decide what to do here.

* In "Definition Lists", there is no extra space between the
  first item and the second - done in bad ASCII art, the
  effect is::

    Term
           Definition
    Term: classifier
           Definition paragraph 1.

           Definition paragraph 2.

  Clearly some of the same work done for lists needs promulgating
  here.

* In "Field Lists", the effect is not so bad, but the vertical gap
  between the first item and the second is about half the size of
  that between the two paragraphs of the second item.

* In "Option Lists", there is again the problem of "internal
  paragraphs" - so the separation between the paragraphs in
  ``--very-long-option`` is much greater than the separation
  between each option.

But, as I said, for "normal" documents, it's looking rather fine - I
like the handling of literal blocks (with the grey background).
Admonition boxes are a bit oversized for their content, but since we're
not meant to be generating those (!) I'm much less fussed about that.

Tibs
--
Tony J Ibbs (Tibs)      http://www.tibsnjoan.co.uk/
Give a pedant an inch and they'll take 25.4mm
(once they've established you're talking a post-1959 inch, of course)
My views! Mine! Mine! (Unless Laser-Scan ask nicely to borrow them.)