Re: LYNX-DEV <base href> change hurts me badly

[Bela Lubkin]

Will Mengarini wrote:

> I just built the new Lynx 2-7.  I have been using the 2-6 release.
> One of the things that was working fine with 2-6 was accessing some
> Emacs documentation on the web.  The complete reference manuals for
> the editor & for e-lisp are available, but their tables of contents
> are so large that I found it worth the time to code a script that
> created a more hierarchical table of contents from the canonical one.
> My hierarchical table would have a page of entries showing each of
> the major topics, & each of those topics would link to its subtopics.
> The subtopics might link directly to the text, which would be
> an http:// URL linking to the copy on the remote server, or they might
> link to subsubtopics, which would be further down in the local table
> of contents.  So http:// links were intermixed with file:// links.
> 
> This local table of contents was built from a remote copy that used
> entirely relative URLs internally, so what I did to intermix the
> two types of links was put in <base href> tags to indicate whether
> the relative URLs were to refer to the remote copy or to a subtopic
> list further down in the document.  This worked fine under 2-6.
> There were 80 <base href> tags in the 627-line document.
> I have several such local tables of contents.

Amidst all this discussion, nobody has pointed out what you should do to
*fix* this situation.

You wrote a script to generate these monstrousities.  Now modify it to
remove the dependencies on <base>.  Instead of emitting:

> <base href="/~/elisp_toc.indiana.htm">
> <LI><A HREF="#SEC200">The Outside Context</A>
> <base href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/lispref/";>
> <LI><A NAME="SEC205" HREF="elisp_16.html#SEC205">Macro Calls</A>

have it emit:

  <LI><A HREF="/~/elisp_toc.indiana.htm#SEC200">The Outside Context</A>
  <LI><A NAME="SEC205" 
HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/lispref/elisp_16.html#SEC205";>Macro 
Calls</A>

... or whatever would be appropriate.  As an optimization, keep the
base-relative tags for the current file:

  <LI><A HREF="#SEC200">The Outside Context</A>
  <LI><A NAME="SEC205" 
HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/lispref/elisp_16.html#SEC205";>Macro 
Calls</A>

You could do this as a modification of your original script, or you
could write a postprocessor to convert the current multi-base files into
what you really meant.

>Bela<
;
; To UNSUBSCRIBE:  Send a mail message to address@hidden
;                  with "unsubscribe lynx-dev" (without the
;                  quotation marks) on a line by itself.
;