Den lör 13 sep. 2025 kl 22:29 skrev Branko Čibej <[email protected]>:

> On 13. 9. 25 22:14, Daniel Sahlberg wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've spent some time updating the website:
> - Migrating from fixed layout to a responsive design that adjusts to
> screen size (mobilefriendlyness) while keeping the existing look&feel.
> - Migrating to HTML5 including using CSS for design instead of hardcoding
> in the "build system".
> - Making sure all links are working
>
> All pages now validate under https://validator.w3.org/ with one notable
> exception:
> Due to Ant/Velocity/Anakia being used as "build system" to generate the
> HTML code, the "source files" must be valid XML. In XML, a self-closing tag
> (ie, one that doesn't have a </end> tag) must be written as <xml />.
> However in HTML, it must NOT be end with />.
>
>
> This is true for HTML 5, but the site is XHTML 1.0, which should be happy
> with things like <br/> instead of <br>. In fact, if I point the validator
> at https://apr.apache.org/, it detects the doctype and shows no errors or
> warnings.
>

I think you missed the second bullet point above, that I changed the
doctype to HTML5 (or, should I say "Living standard" as I just learned it
is called nowadays).

I could, of course, revert that particular change but since XHTML has been
retired since 2018 it is probably time to move on.

This causes problems for guidelines.xml/html and versioning.xml/html. I
> don't see a way to fix this, on the other hand I don't think any web
> browser wouldn't accept this. The only other option would be to move away
> from Anakia completely: Subversion is using Server side includes to bring
> in the common HTML fragments instead of prebuilding complete HTML-files.
>
> I personally found the "generate HTML" less intuitive than the SSI based
> approach of Subversion. With the webpage now using CSS, there is less need
> to have an XML transform adding different properties to all instances of
> the same tag. But I don't want to rip out a whole build system with 20
> years of history...
>
>
>
> SSI is a sad hack, IMO. It puts extra burden on the server. I'm all for
> generating static pages wherever possible. Note that HTTPd generates HTML
> from Markdown, which is much easier on the eyes than XML. I mean, once you
> have XML, you might as well use HTML + static templates instead...
>

I think the extra load is negligible compared to other things in whole
stack (SSL or running a full-blown CMS solution ...PHP...). But of course
it takes more time than just shoving a static page down the network.

HTTPd is using ASF Pelican [1] to generate static pages from HTML. I agree
with Brane on preferring MD over XML and with the simple integration of
Pelican in GitHub Actions it makes updating the site a lot easier. (The
documentation in our site is good, but it still took me a while to setup a
JRE and run Anakia the first time).

The upside of using Pelican is that it is more widely used and actively
supported. The version of Anakia/Velocity we have in /libs/ is a little
dated.. Not that it couldn't be updated to an active version but I tried
and failed...

I'm not sure when I would be able to contribute a significant amount of
time to migrate to Pelican but if it is in the interest of the project, we
could decide to make it a longterm goal to migrate.

Cheers,
Daniel


[1] https://infra.apache.org/asf-pelican.html



>
>
> Speaking about Anakia and SSIs: I tried to be cleaver with the
> /coverage/index.html file. It works fine as it is right now, but I can't
> figure out a way to generate the <!--#include directive. Currently we have
> to edit the index.html file manually before committing.
>
> I've also updated the script generating the coverage report to work with
> the above SSI changes.
>
> If you find any issues, please report them here and I'll take a look!
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel
>
>
>

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