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Errors-To: <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
To: <apache-docs@apache.org>
Subject: RE: Got a question...
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 11:44:14 -0600
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> From: Rodent of Unusual Size [mailto:Ken.Coar@Golux.Com]
> Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2000 5:46 AM
> 
> "William A. Rowe, Jr." wrote:
> > 
> >   The .msi installer package I'm working up can tweak whatever
> > we need, but we have a big issue with index.html.en ... I can't
> > simply resolve a shortcut since win32 doesn't like .en files.
> 
> What doesn't it like about them?  I'd rather try to deal with
> this than warp everything else..  If possible.

Were it so simple.  Here's the underlying issue...

I'm led to believe users should _Always_ be able to read the docs
on the local hard drive?  This is why we run that expand.pl when
rolling the release tarball, delete the FAQ-x.html, and download 
the interpreted FAQ.html from locus.  [Rolling the Release Tarball
on dev.apache.org]

We have two issues, today.  In order for most browsers to recognize
the document type stored on a local drive, they must contain the
META tags for content-type/content-language, since there is not
necessarily an apache server to help them out.  I believe the extra
two lines per doc aren't necessarily a bad thing anyway for our
internal documentation.

The second issue is on file-extension based clients such as ms.
We _could_ add identifiers for each and every known Apache multiview 
file type, (at least those in our docs), but I really, really think
this is excessive.  OTOH, we could copy the index.html.foo encoding
to index.html, but this is equally bad, since it breaks Apache's
multiviews when the user requests /index.html and the browser finds
it without the encoding pass.

The last issue with local docs is that all the hyperlinks are broken,
no matter what, unless we rewrite them.  E.g. the index.html doesn't
go anywhere when we have index.html.en and index.html.ja.jis.  Perhaps,
expand.pl needs to be rewritten, not the names of the files, based
on a language arg - it goes out and 'fixes' the links.  Again, this
breaks the Apache-served web.  

On the good news front, these browsers like the following:

Netscape 4.6 file:///d:/live/apache-1.3/htdocs/manual/index.html.en
Mozilla Seamonkey M18 file:///d|/live/apache-1.3/htdocs/manual/index.html.en
Microsoft 5.0 d:\live\apache-1.3\htdocs\manual\index.html.en

So without much help, they have a clue.  The hardest part really is
the shortcuts and links.  E.g. double clicking FAQ.html.en [when we get
that far] will pop up ugly "Open this file with..." dialogs.  Double
clicking FAQ.html.en does not, while FAQ.en.html would open without a
problem.  And again, the link to the index.html page is broken.  

AARGH!  New suggestions from me later :-/

Bill