[Doc-SIG] Adaptable file extensions (was: New concept of "commands"?)

[Luc Saffre]

Yes, <http://docutils.sf.net/spec/notes.html#adaptable-file-extensions>
seems a good solution for the problem of "intra-site" or "local" links 
(i mean links who stay on the same site).

I just made a first release of WebMan which is a candidate for such a 
change, and which gives a concrete application:
<http://lino.sourceforge.net/webman.html>
When WebMan generates static html, then the file extension for 
intra-site links is ".html", but when WebMan runs as a Medusa/Quixote 
server, there must be no extension at all. Though currently the links 
are hard-coded with ".html". That's why intra-site links currently fail 
when you serve a WebMan module dynamically.

 From WebMan's point of view I can say that support for file types other 
than documents is not necessary and makes things complicated. The rule 
should simply be: if an URL ends with ".*", then ask the Writer for the 
file extension and replace the ".*" by this.

For someone who has Python and docutils installed it should be 
relatively painless to get the sources from CVS,
(see http://lino.sourceforge.net/install.html#get-the-sources)
insert them manually to your Python path (don't run setup.py!) and run 
the scripts webman.py and webmandemo.py. (Oops: for webmandemo.py you 
will also need medusa and quixote installed:
http://www.amk.ca/python/code/medusa.html
http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/)

Luc Saffre


On 21/11/2003 8:01, David Goodger wrote:
> Luc Saffre wrote:
>  > - Substitutions : are not a candidate for my problem because there
>  > is no possibility to specify parameters.
> 
> Perhaps not.  Not directly anyhow.  Did you look at the proposal at
> <http://docutils.sf.net/spec/notes.html#adaptable-file-extensions>?