Re: Any interest in using HTML for locally-installed Texinfo documentation?

[Per Bothner <per@bothner.com>]

On 4/3/19 2:11 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

>> What I do for the Kawa manual is generate an 'epub' archive, which is
>> basically a zip archive, with compression.  It is fairly simple for a
>> web server to extract a zip member and send it to a browser directly
>> as a gzip-compressed file, without actually decompressing the file
>> (until it gets to the browser).  I contributed support for this to
>> https://libwebsockets.org/, which is a compact C-language http server.
>> DomTerm uses this to "serve" the JavaScript files to the browser,
>> and a revamped 'info' program could do the same.
> 
> A simpler solution might be to use ‘Content-Encoding: gzip’.

That is what libwebsockets does given a zip archive (and a browser
that can handle Content-Encoding: gzip).  There is a little bit of header munging,
but it turns out the the compression used for a member of a zip archive is
exactly the same as used by ‘Content-Encoding: gzip’.  So the web server can
extract the compressed data from the zip archive and send it directly to the
browser without having to decompress and then re-compress it.

DomTerm does the same for its JavaScript and css files: They're installed as a
zip archive, and the domterm command (using libwebsockets) starts up a browser window
with a URL pointing back at itself.  When files are requested it can send them
to the browser as ‘Content-Encoding: gzip’, without having to uncompress them first.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/