Re: [RFC,wwwdocs] Ditch MetaHTML and use our own Perl preprocessor

[Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at pfeifer dot com>]

[ Omitting gcc-patches ]

On Sun, 30 Sep 2007, Janne Blomqvist wrote:
> I think that if indeed metahtml is in such a bad shape as you
> describe, moving away from it asap is the right thing to do. But I'm
> not convinced that developing a gcc.gnu.org-specific template engine
> is the correct answer.

That's my concern as well.  I certainly would not mind replacing MetaHTML
and I very much appreciate if FX or others can help.  And I would not mind
if this involves a bit of scripting, but it would be good to reuse/share 
as much from other project as possible and not have this purely GCC-
specific unless the scripting is really trivial.

> There's plenty of such things available out there that are actively 
> maintained and developed. E.g. "Template Toolkit" seems rather widely 
> used, is written in perl (not my favourite language, but...) so it 
> should work on the current webserver

There is one property of our web pages which I'd like to keep if
possible, and that is that the pages themselves are simple HTML and
the preprocessing only adds style, navigation, footers etc.

On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, François-Xavier Coudert wrote:
> ping? Gerald, being web pages maintainers, what's your opinion?
> 
> Answering to Janne's comment, I'm certainly not opposed to any
> preprocessor/templating system. My own goal is to rewrite the fortran
> pages, including the common navigation bar, and I can't use MetaHTML
> to do that.

Have you been able to get things running with the input from the mail
I sent a week or so ago?

In the meantime I did a bit of further research, and http://thewml.org,
specifically http://thewml.org/docs/backend/wml_p2_mp4h.html may be worth
a closer look.  It occurs to me that this would allow us to reuse most of
the existing infrastructure, and it is still actively maintained.  

Thoughts?

Gerald