[ I hate to wade into this, but .... ] > >However, as you surely know, this does not work without web server, since > >the browsers are not looking for "foo.html.gz" if "foo.html" is > >referenced. > > Yes. But if you change the references then the web-serverws will no longer > do on the fly decompression. They will serve the links as .gz which is not > universally supported by web-browsers not under Debians control.
For cases where people want to use a web browser that doesn't grok gzip, we could use dwww (I think). > >Thus, we are considering changing the "href's" to "foo.html.gz" and fix > >the browsers, where possible, to uncompress the file on-the-fly. If the > >browser cannot be fixed (for example, if we don't have the source code) we > >could probably offer a simple web server (e.g. boa) to do this > >automatically. > > Please think about this. > > You are proposing that a web-server is supposed to be searching through > the .html code it serves and replace all links referring to .html.gz by > .html links? dwww does this - it's not trivial. This is definitely not the job of a web server. So here's my stand: - let's munch up the links to point to ".html.gz" files. Ugly, I know, and a bit of work, but then we don't need to force people to install a web server. I think it's pretty important that we don't force people to run stuff they don't want. - we should compress html, because lots of people (like me) are using Debian on machines with almost no hard drive. - Lynx and Netscape work with the compressed links (correct me if I'm wrong), and we could use a web server/dwww combination to allow other browsers to work too. - all the documentation isn't going to be HTML anyways - just "book-like" stuff. So what's the big deal anyways. No need to start a flame-war. - the other option would be to leave HTML full uncompressed, which would be easiest Cheers, - Jim
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