Generate table of all elements automatically, using existing element definitions

[mozfreddyb]

Currently, the table that lists all elements of HTML is manually generated. It seems useful to have an auto-generated list that is fed by the <dfn element> blocks and the <dl class="element"> block underneath.

Would anyone else be interested in this change?
I would be willing to take a stab at prototyping this, but am unfamiliar with a couple of points:

• Would it be acceptable if the existing table became more prosaic (e.g., being fed by the definition list rather than the existing, terse table values)? This could be solved iteratively, over time by improving the individual items to be acceptable for both the element definition and the table.
• It looks like wattsi is already collecting <dfn>-definitions as DFNElement while parsing for the purpose of cross-referencing. But I wasn't really able to find code that looks at the definition lists. Maybe that doesn't exist yet? I suppose one could pick them up along the way (where?) and maintain a growing datastructure.
• Where would we emit that data structure? Would that happen explicitly by defining some new macro?

As you can see, I thought about this for a while, but there are many open questions and I'd be curious to hear if this is interesting to anyone else.

[domenic]

This would be lovely, but we'd need to preserve the existing text; making the content worse to support the tooling would not be a good idea. This might involve, e.g., adding something to the source near the element definition which contains the table description, which is removed from the DOM (and moved into the table).

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by your second point, but maybe XrefsByDFNAnchor or CrossReferences.DFNs are what you're looking for?

A new macro makes sense to me.

[annevk]

Looking at the table it seems that we could annotate the <dl class="element"> block with additional attributes and that should allow generating most if not all of it, preserving the existing style. The main tricky bit might be the short description. I guess that would be something we'd only show in the index and hide in the <dl> (unless we want to display a brief abstract somewhere).

[domenic]

I don't think an attribute would work since we need hypertext.