Bug#41352: compressed HTML/dhelp

[ron@microtronics.com.au (Ron)]

> A unreadable documentation is a waste of space, IMHO.

by that definition all .ps docs are a waste of space on several
machines I know of ;-)

> One simply question: do you know any web pages in the internet
> sending compressed html to their users? I don_t know one.

I have done it on our VPN.  'Global' creates them just nicely when
you want to publish source code as html.  If I had a 24/7/365
connection they would be on the net.
 
> Where does the HTML standard describe compressed HTML files?
> HTML is defined as an uncompressed format.

So its against the standard for your modem to compress them too??
The HTML standard says nothing about how files are stored on your
disks, only that files are marked up in a human readable format.
 
> > is a relatively simple matter to configure a httpd to
> > uncompress them on the fly
> 
> Really? How can I do this as a *user*? 

ok, this is a slightly more real problem, but surely you communicate
with your sysadmin??  If (s)he doesn't care that something on the
system is unusable to you then you have a much bigger problem than
compressed html ;-)

Seriously though Marco, I can see that this is causing you a problem
but I don't agree that it is a bug that all Debian users should have
to suffer the fix to, or that the change you request should be a
precedent that spreads to other packages too.  Even versions of
netscape that don't support it by default can be configured pretty
easily to send anything with a .gz extension to a helper program
(ie. gzip) to decompress them before display.  (and there are .gz
decompressors for other OS's too)

Configuring your software to be able to read docs you need to read
seems a whole lot less painful than ultimately requiring some other
people to install new hardware so they can have them installed.

IMHO it is right to close this bug. (and discussion of the reasons
you think it is a bug and implications of 'fixing' it the way you
suggest probably belong elsewhere, reply to me privately or move
this to -devel, but I really have nothing more to add.)  

best,
Ron.