Re: Correspondence between web-pages and Info-pages

[Kelly Dean <kelly@prtime.org>]

chad wrote:
> If the info browser is re-parsing the URL anyway, whats the value
> added by forcing any change into the web server at all?

Suppose Emacs gets an integrated browser, that displays both HTML pages and Info pages. Like Firefox is an integrated browser for HTML and PDF. In the latter case, if some document is available in both versions, you can often pick which one you want by just swapping ⌜.html⌝ vs. ⌜.pdf⌝ at the end of the URL. If both the HTML and PDF versions of a page were named ⌜foo⌝ (or even worse, both were named ⌜foo.html⌝), how would you pick which one to request from the server? Would you have the web browser send a different request header, so that the name of the PDF version is ⌜foo⌝ plus that header? That's the bad idea I argued against in my original message.

One of the desired features that other people have already expressed in this thread is for Info files to be available on the web, and enable the Info browser to automatically download files that it doesn't already have cached when you try to open URLs for Info pages that are in those files. So having a single name that resolves to an HTML page online in a web browser, but to an Info page offline in an Info browser, doesn't work. The Info browser has to work online, and it's logical to integrate it with the web browser, which means there must be a way to specify Info vs. HTML for the page you want. And you specify what you want by using the name of it. That name should be a URL, not a URL plus something else.

And the only change ‟forced into the web server” is to have the name ⌜foo⌝ resolve to a redirect page (which is already a standard feature available in web server software), so that names are just URLs, and clients, not servers, choose whether to redirect to foo.html (specified by the Location header, compatible with standard web browsers) or to the Info file specified by the Info-file header (which Emacs's Info browser will understand). An HTML-Info-integrated browser in Emacs will understand both, so it can offer the user a choice. If you prefer Info, and people send you post-redirect names to HTML, you can tell Info to automatically chop off the ⌜.html⌝ extension. If you prefer HTML, no change is necessary. When you send people names, you or they can chop off the ⌜.html⌝. The name with no extension is simply a way to automatically give people a link to both formats of the page, not just to one or the other.

The value added is:
There's a single name that points to both the Info and HTML pages, as Stefan wants.
The choice is made by the client, as explained above and in my original message.
The design enables clean integration of the HTML browser and the Info browser in the future.