Bug#41352: HTML & dhelp
Marco Budde wrote:
> > I think the documentation should be compressed. Isn't this a
>
> Great and how should the user read the documentation?!?
>
> > matter of Policy?
>
> No, HTML documentation is defined as uncompressed format.
Hmm, I looked at the current Policy. It doesn't say explicitely what to do
with html docs. Instead it says that "all other text documents" (besides
man pages and info texts) should be compressed unless it is small.
Nevertheless, almost all html pages in /usr/doc are in fact uncompressed.
> > Besides, lots of uncompressed HTML files would
> > waste lots of space.
>
> There´s no other solution.
Well, I wouldn't say it so definitely. However, when thinking about it, I
must admit that there would be lots of problems with bad links inside upstream
documentation if we would compress HTML files.
> > Which browser are you using? IMO the "usual" browsers (netscape, lynx)
> > support gzip.
>
> No. A lot of installations of netscape don´t support
> a gzip transfer encoding (for example netscape running on
> a Win95 system).
This, at least, is only half-true. First, I seem to remember that some
version of Netscape (4.0x?) did uncompress .gz files on its own. But
actually I always considered this a bug because it didn't let me download
unmodified .tar.gz files. Then, this "feature" was removed from 4.[56].
Second, like Marcus said, you can set up your web server to uncompress
the files.
Finally, a relatively simple solution which could be incorporated in dwww
for example, is to let your Web-Server send a certain header together
with the gzipped page:
Content-encoding: x-gzip
This works with Communicator 4.61 in Win95 (you may test it with a simple
cgi script).
> > This should be sufficient for local reading of documentation.
>
> Maybe the user don´t want to read it local?!?
Well, it's documentation of locally installed packages. There are only
a few cases where it makes sense to read Linux documentation when running
Win95. And you always could use Lynx in a telnet session.
Ulf
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