Re: Servers for WWW/HTML?

Rik Harris ([email protected])
Thu, 05 Aug 93 12:04:09 +1100


> Does server software exist to produce HTML marked up (Unix?) manual pages
> on request? Presumably this sort of application would be generally useful, for
> example for individual hardware manufacturers, program manuals, PC manuals etc
>
> In short, any type of on-line manual which has structured manual pages.

OK, I finally did it. Version 0.5 of my man2www package which I have
told several people that I would make available "in a couple of weeks"
many months ago, is now available. This may not be entirely what you
wanted, David, but I've been promising this for a while. You can get
it from:

ftp.vifp.monash.edu.au:/pub/src/infosystems/www/man2www0.5.tar.gz

It converts UNIX manual pages to nicely formatted html. Headings are
headings, italics are italics, formatting is not too bad, and
references to other manuals are hypertexted. And it still has some
bugs. I'll fix them if I ever get time.

> I am sure that there are servers around the world which do this, but it
> would make sense if the software were distributed to take a load off the
> host machines, and also to speed up access for end users, who would access
> local rather than remote servers.

It also probably makes copyright sense too. I'm not sure about how
legal it is to make manual pages available to the world. Some people
pay a lot for documentation.

rik.

--
Rik Harris - [email protected]
+61 3 560-3265 (AH & ans.mach)      +61 3 565-3227 (BH)
Faculty of Computing and Information Technology,
Clayton Campus, Monash University, Australia