Re: Additions to local web documents
>>"Christoph" == Christoph <debian@waterf.org> writes:
Christoph> On Sun, 4 May 1997, Jim Pick wrote:
Manoj> Hi, Suppose a package wants supply cgi scripts and/or static HTML
Manoj> files for use with a local HTTP server, what is the standard
Manoj> location fot these files? I thought that /var/www was the Document
Manoj> root decreed by the Web Standard, but I now see a bug report
Manoj> against dwww for assuming that. manoj
Jim> /var/www for html files
Christoph> /var/www is discouraged to be used by the webstandard. Do
Christoph> not use it unless you have documents that need to be
Christoph> modified on a regular basis.
What is the rationale behind this? And where do auto generated
files go? I think this is a defect in the webstandard, and needs to
be addressed. In my opinion the Web standard fails to address the
four cases I have detailed below.
Christoph> Use /usr/doc/<package> to store static HTML code and refer
Christoph> to it by using the URL
Christoph> http://<hostname>/doc/<package>
Christoph> Register the documentation with the menu package.
This would be fine for documentation, but what about
non-documentation files? spescialy packages targeted towards
providing local Web services?
cases:
1) I have a modified MOMSpider that very configurably checks the
several local doc tree (it recognizes that different part of the
site have different maintainers, so one may configure the spider
appropriately). It generates mail messages, and lots of reports,
which should be visible from my server.
If I package this, where do the reports go?
2) I have a common log format gopher/ftp/http log digester that
generates a nice povray image of server statistics. Where do the
gif files go?
3) LaTeX2HTML converted documents have traditionally refered to
the relative URL /usr/lib/latex2html/icons/X.gif. This worls
fine for the base url file:// (when viewing the files directly
using lynx/netscape/w3, but if this is to be visible from my
sever, I need to create the directory
<Document Root>/usr/lib/latex2html/icons/
and populate this with a forest of links.
4) I have written a HTML validation package, that consists fo a
Perl CGI-script, which puts up a form where users can type in
HTML snippets or URL's to full documents, the output is a
rendered image of the document, with line numbers added, the
output os nsgmls, a list of all HTML keywords found, with
pointer to a detailed description (actually, the DTD is parsed
into a tree, and all leaf nodes are described, so one may view
other grammatical details).
All these files maybe periodically updated whenever new DTD
files become available; I don't think these files should pollute
the doc heirarchy, since they are not documentation.
IMHO it is time we nailed down a document root, and recommend
that packages use that for local files/data. Jim said that he uses
/var/www for the sytem provided files, and uses /var/something for
his other servers; I think that might be a good place to start.
manoj
--
"I will defend to your death my right to my opinion." Author Unknown
Manoj Srivastava <url:mailto:srivasta@acm.org>
Mobile, Alabama USA <url:http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
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