On Wed, 15 Jan 2025, David Malcolm wrote: > The heading elements in our website contain "id" information, > but currently to find them you to look at the page source, > whereas in the generated HTML for the manual we have e.g.: > > <a class="copiable-link" href="#index-mabi-1"> ¶</a> > > which shows up nicely in the browser in e.g. > https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/ARM-Options.html : > It's *very* helpful to have easily shareable links to within pages.
Absolutely agreed. > I've never managed to build MetaHTML and have always just crossed my > fingers and hoped when making edits to the GCC website; bin/preprocess > just errors out for me immediately due to not finding mhc. Yes, sadly the GNU project let MetaHTML die (though I raised this more than once). I still think the concept as such was fine and it served us well over the years, but building has been challenging 20 years ago and would require some fierce source code editing nowadays. :-( > So this patch as written replaces the invocation of mhc with an > invocation of the python script, which of course drops various features. Yeah! I was hoping we could return to your script. IIRC I once pinged and you were busy; happy to collaborate on finishing this up. In any case, a few years ago I spent quite some time and effort to prepare the stage, migrating the site to CSS (done) and making individual pages self contained (also done), which removed most of the original MetaHTML usage. This is why things appear somewhat fine, even without MetaHTML available. > and, for now, the loss of the mhc stuff here: > https://dmalcolm.fedorapeople.org/gcc/2025-01-15/htdocs/ > > compared to: > https://gcc.gnu.org/ So it appears the two biggest losses are (1) the default footer on every page, and (2) the navigation bar on the main page? Plus (3) loss of favicon.ico on every page, (4) postprocessing of /install docs, (5) no longer adding "- GNU Project" to every page title. Anything else you are aware of? > Gerald: if you have mhc working, can you please try adjusting the > bin/ so it runs *both*. mhc and the python script. I have a 32-bit x86 build on a local machine which probably is 20+ years old, plus a comparable, though not identical, build on gcc.gnu.org. Building newly is something I tried a while ago and gave up. Not infeasible when one patches out code we don't need to some non-standard things, but painful and not worth it. (I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by the above, i.e., what you'd like to see adjusted?) > --- a/bin/preprocess > +++ b/bin/preprocess > @@ -33,8 +33,6 @@ > # > # By Gerald Pfeifer <pfei...@dbai.tuwien.ac.at> 1999-12-29. ^^^^^^^^^^ Well, talking about old code! Back then MetaHTML built fine IIRC on your average GNU/Linux distribution. :-/ How do we best take it from there? I believe at this point, and with MetaHTML unrecoverably dead for 10+ years, and my website rework there isn't dramatically much left we're missing. htdocs/style.mhtml actually tells us what, the two bigger items being (1) default footer and (2) navigation bar on the main page as listed above. (The BACKPATH code in style.mhtmlwas used for the GCJ main page, which is gone now. Of course it would be nice to have navigation on every page, but that's an enhancement, not a regression to avoid.) With those two addressed, and (3) possibly later on, I think we should bite the bullet, rip of the bandaid, plunge into the cold water, whatever idiom we want to use. :-) How can we tackle those? Maybe some "macros", best HTML comments that insert text or include a text file from a magic subdirectory? We could use that for the navigation aspect. And some "include this text before </body> in every single document" magic for the default footer? (Disclaimer: these are just some ideas. There may be vastly better ways.) What do you think? Gerald
