From owner-freebsd-doc  Mon Apr 12 14:49: 2 1999
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Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1999 22:15:39 +0100
From: Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk>
To: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@panke.de.freebsd.org>
Cc: nik@FreeBSD.ORG, wosch@cs.tu-berlin.de, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: docs/6508: sgmlfmt does not expand relative URLs
Message-ID: <19990412221539.A62203@catkin.nothing-going-on.org>
References: <199904092125.OAA32384@freefall.freebsd.org> <19990411194126.48734@panke.de.freebsd.org>
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In-Reply-To: <19990411194126.48734@panke.de.freebsd.org>; from Wolfram Schneider on Sun, Apr 11, 1999 at 07:41:26PM +0200
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On Sun, Apr 11, 1999 at 07:41:26PM +0200, Wolfram Schneider wrote:
> On 1999-04-09 14:25:14 -0700, nik@FreeBSD.org wrote:
> > Synopsis: sgmlfmt does not expand relative URLs
> > 
> > State-Changed-From-To: open->closed
> > State-Changed-By: nik
> > State-Changed-When: Fri Apr 9 14:24:15 PDT 1999
> > State-Changed-Why: 
> > You can't use relative URLs in the Handbook / FAQ, because you don't
> > know where it's going to be installed relative to the rest of the
> > website (or even *if* it's going to be installed with the rest of
> > the website).
> 
> ??? 
> 
> The location of the handbook (/handbook/) and the FAQ (/FAQ/) 
> is well known on the web site. The same is true for ports
> projects, releases etc. 

True, but;

> Our web mirrors *require* relative paths. Even a 155Mbit/s
> Internet link is easy to overload.

Only if you assume that everything will

   a) be mirroring the website and the handbook,

   b) have a mirror of the form http://www.foo.bar/, and not 
      http://www.foo.bar/mirrors/FreeBSD/ (for example).

I think the correct solution is to enforce absolute paths in the website,
coupled with the &base; entity (which we already do).  The FAQ, Handbook,
and tutorials need to be treated differently (because they are independent
of the website, and can be installed without the website).

For those we need a similar entity (but possibly called something like
&FreeBSDURL;, because &base; is too vague) that points to wherever they
want references to the website to resolve to.

For most people, this would probably be 

    <!ENTITY FreeBSDURL "http://www.freebsd.org/">

For someone like yourself, who probably has a local copy of the website
permanently installed somewhere, and a webserver running, you could 
have

    <!ENTITY FreeBSDURL "http://localhost/FreeBSDMirror/">

or even

    <!ENTITY FreeBSDURL "../">

Each URL that refers to the site in the Handbook and FAQ then looks 
something like;

    <ulink url="&FreeBSDURL;search.html">the search pages</ulink>

Does that make sense?  I can submit this as a separate PR, if you want.

N
-- 
                    Bagel: The carbohydrate with the hole


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