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Re: fixhrefgz - tool for converting anchors to gzipped files



[ I hate to wade into this, but .... ]

> >However, as you surely know, this does not work without web server, since
> >the browsers are not looking for "foo.html.gz" if "foo.html" is
> >referenced.
> 
> Yes. But if you change the references then the web-serverws will no longer
> do on the fly decompression. They will serve the links as .gz which is not
> universally supported by web-browsers not under Debians control.

For cases where people want to use a web browser that doesn't grok gzip,
we could use dwww (I think).
 
> >Thus, we are considering changing the "href's" to "foo.html.gz" and fix
> >the browsers, where possible, to uncompress the file on-the-fly. If the
> >browser cannot be fixed (for example, if we don't have the source code) we
> >could probably offer a simple web server (e.g. boa) to do this
> >automatically.
> 
> Please think about this.
> 
> You are proposing that a web-server is supposed to be searching through
> the .html code it serves and replace all links referring to .html.gz by
> .html links?

dwww does this - it's not trivial.  This is definitely not the job of
a web server.
 
So here's my stand:

- let's munch up the links to point to ".html.gz" files.  Ugly, I know,
  and a bit of work, but then we don't need to force people to install a
  web server.  I think it's pretty important that we don't force people
  to run stuff they don't want.

- we should compress html, because lots of people (like me) are using
  Debian on machines with almost no hard drive.

- Lynx and Netscape work with the compressed links (correct me if I'm wrong),
  and we could use a web server/dwww combination to allow other browsers
  to work too.

- all the documentation isn't going to be HTML anyways - just "book-like"
  stuff.  So what's the big deal anyways.  No need to start a flame-war.

- the other option would be to leave HTML full uncompressed, which would
  be easiest

Cheers,

 - Jim


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