Re: Updated gendocs_template

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 02:46:54PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
     Hi John,
     
     Thanks for working on the revised and modernized template, but I don't
     think XHTML should be used by default.  I don't have any real
     statistics, but I feel like there are far too many people still using
     older browsers for that.

This wasn't my  personal decision.  It's what the GNU webmasters  want
for all the new pages. See 
http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html#HTMLGuidelines

As I understand it, XHTML is designed to display in a rational fashion
even on older browsers.  It looked OK when I tested it on lynx,
Mozilla and IE5.
     
     As for the bottom text, which seems the other principal change, I
     actually messed with that text because I didn't like the verbosity and
     redundancy in the original.  I did make a couple of changes to it just
     now after seeing your version.
  
If you mean the bits between <div copyright> and </div>, then again,
that's what the GNU people want.  I simply cut and pasted from
http://www.gnu.org/boilerplate.html

   
     If there's a way to make a version that satisfies both XHTML and regular
     HTML, I'd like to see it.  My understanding is that XHTML is not
     backward compatible, unfortunately, so that something as simple as <hr>
     is no longer allowed, and <hr/> doesn't work as regular HTML.  

I thought it did, but I don't have a suite of old browsers to test with.

     (Which
     seems like an utterly irrational language decision to me, but anyway,
     that's a different story.)  We went through some pain with this with
     makeinfo's HTML output for the GCC folks, and ended up backing out all
     the attempts at XHTML due to such incompatibilities.
     
     Thanks,
     karl
     
     P.S. Of course anyone is welcome to use any template they like.  I'd be
     happy to put your version in the distribution as an XHTML form for
     anyone who wants it.

That's your decision of course.  I made these modifications, so that I
could create pages for GNU manuals which conformed to GNU website
guidelines. 

Cheers,



John

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