ping? Gerald, being web pages maintainers, what's your opinion? Answering to Janne's comment, I'm certainly not opposed to any preprocessor/templating system. My own goal is to rewrite the fortran pages, including the common navigation bar, and I can't use MetaHTML to do that.
On 9/29/07, FX Coudert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I am in the process of rewriting the Fortran part of our website > (http://gcc.gnu.org/), part of which consists of adding the GCC > navigation bar. To do so, I had to install localy MetaHTML, our > current web preprocessor, and my experiences with it have left me > less than impressed [1]. We currently use it for including headers > and footer, making them depend on whether we are preprocessing HTML > or XHTML, modifying in place a few tags (<title>, <h1>, <body>) and > adding navigation bar on files that need it. This can easily be done > by a simple preprocessing script, and seeing that MetaHTML was last > released 1999 and apparently unsupported since then, I suggest that > we do this move right now. > > This patch includes the new preprocessor, changes to the script, and > quite a few new files (footer, navigation bars, etc.) split from the > MetaHTML file, style.mhtml. I chose to write the preprocessor script > in Perl, since Perl is already used for the wwwdocs/bin/preprocess > script, so I'm sure it will be available on the webserver. The > preprocessor does what MetaHTML was needed, but it can be extended in > the future if we need more functionality. Also, we can in the future > offload some of its work, such as <body> and <h1> modifications and > part of the navigation bar to CSS, which is obviously better suited > for the job. I intend to do so as a follow-up to the preprocessor > change, if/when it is accepted. > > This change shouldn't change the website, but I can't check since I > don't have MetaHTML, so I'd appreciate if someone with shell access > to the webserver could check it. Oh, there is one thing that I > changed: the detailled search page, http://gcc.gnu.org/search.html, > currently has a "Database last updated YYYY-MM-DD" line that doesn't > work (it displays "1900--"), so I removed it. > > Comments are highly welcome, both on the idea itself, and on the Perl > script (my Perl is a bit rusty since I haven't used it for years). > > Thanks, > FX > > > [1] As a record, here's what my "final" status is: in addition to > Gerald's patch and script provided by Joel Sherrill (thanks guys), I > needed to patch of few more (~ 15) occurences of multilines strings, > force the Makefiles to use the version of readline included in > metahtml instead of the system one (too recent, apparently there's > been an ABI change), and tweak the Makefiles for the shared modules, > which aren't portable (at least, not to Mac OS). As of yesterday, > I've managed to compile it, but the resulting binary acts as an > endless cpu-consuming loop. At that point, I gave up.