Re: doc directory of the web pages
It appears you now know all my concerns/wishes. Just a few comments on
how CN is handled in apache which I'm sure you will find annoying. I do.
On Mon, Nov 30, 1998 at 03:41:33AM -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> In article <[🔎] 19981129155146.D10057@debian.org>, "James A. Treacy" <treacy@debian.org> writes:
> >
> > I wouldn't recommend the content negotiation (CN) approach for the
> > /usr/doc directory since most users will not enable CN in their
> > browser. Guess we'll need to come up with a convention for that
> > anyway. How about html.<lang> ?
>
> Argh. I don't like inconsistency at all. It's a big PITA. Why can
> we just keep it consistent? People only need to know about
> index.de.html if it exists. Maybe it's clutter, but so what?
>
Unfortunately, it is not possible to design a set of web pages that work
properly with CN turned on and off. With CN turned off, links without
the .html at the end will not work. On the other hand, if you fully specify
the filename in the link, then there is no possibility for CN.
When I first started working on this, I naively thought that you could use
the alternate form for language extensions, file.html.<lang>, to get around
this (btw, this convention for filenames has the drawback that the server
doesn't recognize the mime type correctly. I consider this a bug in apache.
The web pages currenly use this form but will be switching to
file.<lang>.html soon).
The idea was to specify links using file.html hoping that the server would
use CN to specify the correct language and fall back to using the file
named file.html only as a last resort. Since file.html would be a link to
file.html.en english would be the language used if none could be negotiated.
Unfortunately, apache serves a file if the name matches exactly. Aaargh.
I don't know if this is apaches interpretation of the http spec or if
it is stated explicitly.
The bottom line is that links either need to leave off the file extensions
and only be used with CN or links need to name a file exactly in which
case CN doesn't get us anything.
Jay Treacy
Reply to: