[Gimp-web] Static pages for m.g.o

[Raphaël Quinet]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003 18:34:09 -0700, Helvetix Victorinox <helvetix@mysterious.org> wrote:
>   The trouble with this is the main index.html (nee index.htrw) actually
> includes the news file (includes/news.inc) and is a real dynamic page.
> We could solve this by avoiding the include altogether and using
> OBJECT or EMBED, but I don't know how that will affect the Netscape
> 4 compatibility.

Using OBJECT or EMBED would be a step backwards, because it would just
be another way to include the contents dynamically and it would even
push the problem further because all the work would have to be done on
the client side instead of the server side.  So we should certainly
not do that.  But I don't think that generating a static index.html
would be a problem.  We simply have to update it when news.inc is
updated.  This is a simple dependency tracking problem, so it should
be solved easily by the Makefile.  If index.html depends on
includes/news.inc, it will be rebuilt every time the news file is
updated.

By the way, the current Makefile is a bit short on dependencies.  It
relies mostly on implicit dependencies and it should have more
explicit ones.  These could be generated automatically, just like it
is done when building the GIMP.  All generated files should depend on
the Makefile and on the files that are included.  This is not urgent,
though.

>   So either a new way to include the dynamic news data on the top-level
> index.html needs to be devised, or we rename the .htrw files (those that
> can really become static) .ssi and vice-versa.  I favour the latter becau=
se
> renaming files (which I'm happy to take care of) is less troublesome in t=
erms
> of testing, ongoing maintenance, and accessibility to non-programmers, th=
an
> in more code.

Renaming all files is not very good for CVS.  It would be better to
rename the two .ssi files to .htrw than to rename all 82 .htrw files
to .ssi.  Also, I do not understand why the name of the files would
make testing and manintenance more or less troublesome, since all
files would be processed in exactly the same way.

My goal is to simplify the current build system: there should be only
one set of source files (the name can be .htrw or .ssi, this is not
very important but .htrw may be better for the current CVS).  The same
rules would be applied to all files to generate the corresponding
.html files.  It should be easy for a new contributor to understand
that the source files are the .htrw files and the generated files are
the .html files.

-Raphaël