[Doxygen-develop] handling description markup/semantics for SQLite3 "output"?

[Travis E. <tra...@gm...>]

All,

I'm resuming work on refining the experimental SQLite3 output. I've run
into a pretty obvious quandary that I was blissfully ignorant of:

Before output-format-specific conversion, it looks like detailed
descriptions can include (at least) a mix of HTML and raw text that still
contains doxygen commands (I haven't gone fishing, but my guess is that
markdown gets translated down to HTML, and output translators are
responsible for the rest).

When it's being served by an SQL database, it doesn't seem like there's an
"obvious" or "expected" format for presentational/semantic markup embedded
in the detailed description. I was a bit surprised to find plaintext
Doxygen commands present at this stage.

I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on how to handle these. The best three
paths forward seem to be:

- Saving it as XML. I'm not keen on this since it significantly raises the
bar on using the sql output, and would require either updating all of the
descriptions in place, or parsing them into a more useful form on each use.
- Saving an opinionated plaintext translation. This would retain simple
usability and avoid the update-all-descriptions or constantly-reparse
issues, as long as consumers can live with the format ;)
- Some active, user-configurable translation method (probably translate to
XML and then call a user-defined translator script as with input filters.
*not sure how complex this would be or where to start; may be getting out
of my depth.

Thanks for any direction,
Travis