Re: [wwwdocs] Describe how to validate wwwdocs changes

[Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at pfeifer dot com>]

On Mon, 14 May 2018, Martin Sebor wrote:
>> Martin, what do you think?  Would that have avoided the challenges
>> your ran into?  Anything to better clarify or otherwise improve?
> Thanks for the improvement!  I think it will help going forward

Great, I (finally) committed this now, business travel not exactly
having been helpful with my GCC engagements...

> assuming one knows about the page and remembers to check it.
> I have to confess I forgot about it so I didn't check it before
> running the validator the last time.  Would it be possible to add
> the snippet to each page permanently?

You mean, avoiding preprocessing and making the change permanent,
directly as part of every .html file?

I've been hesitant doing that to keep things simple and easier to
change (and not bother folks), but think this makes sense and plan
on doing that as we migrate our pages to HTML 5 which will drastically
reduce the size of that snippet also.  I expect to find time to do 
so in the coming few months, and things should indeed be simpler than.


One improvement I just made is to add a reference to 
  https://gcc.gnu.org/about.html 
to the automated checker that runs after each commit.  That provides 
more background then.

> Alternatively, what do you think of the idea to have a script (or
> makefile) to post-process changes to these pages on the client side,
> before checking them in?  I.e., adding the example annotation David
> Malcolm prefers (black background) and also validating the HTML).

That's a great idea.  Sadly our post-processing relies on MetaHTML,
a GNU projects that was handled in, umm, a less than optimal manner,
and has been in coma for years and thus does not build with current
compilers on current operating system versions.

At least GCC Summit in Praha David and me chatted about it, and he
was thinking to (re)implement the key functionality we use in Python,
so let me include him here.

(In any case, with the move to CSS and the forthcoming move to HTML 5
that dependency has been and will be reducing over time.)

Gerald