< Important notes for users of older versionsNotes for users of versions before 0.9.4 >

Notes for users of versions before 0.7.0

From version 0.7.0 on, input parsing is much stricter to distinct STML and HTML. Earlier versions of STML allowed to embed HTML tags into the text. In fact, the STML parser simply overread any tag opening (as “<” is no special character in STML) and ignored any HTML stuff. If you wanted a triangle brace “<” in your document, you had to write “&lt;” in your input.

Since version 0.7.0, the STML output system is aware of all HTML special entities and does correct conversion. So, “<” is now automatically converted to “&lt;”. So, the given input produces the wanted result (if I write “<”, I would like to see “<”), what is the main reason for STML to exists at all. On the other hand, now it is impossible to produce random HTML tags any more.

From HelpSetMaker 0.7.0 on, you cannot put any direct HTML into your STML documents any more.

This change is needed for two reasons:

  1. As already said, STML should be simple. And simple means: No HTML tags. It simply confuses any author unfamiliar with that kind of stuff...

  2. Disabling any possibility to write straight HTML in the input makes the input text much more format-independant. This way, we have the best and least error-prone way to other, HTML-independant formats like LaTeX.

Transition of older documents

Apart from tables (which are not representable in STML currently), HTML tags or entities seem to have had their only occurrence in line breaks (“<br>”) and non-breakable spaces (“&nbsp;”). These two items are now directly representable in STML:

The “:raw” command of STML will continue to exist for a while. In its line, HTML tags are still possible. So, if a direct tag is still needed for something, this command can be used. Note however that such documents will not render correctly if output to LaTeX.

< Important notes for users of older versionsNotes for users of versions before 0.9.4 >