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[Removing our guest from the distribution list.]<br>
<br>
On 03/29/2013 12:33 PM, Daniel Shahaf wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20130329163351.GB2985@lp-shahaf.local"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">As a first-order approximation, old versions of the book could use the
one-giant-HTML-page version of the 1.7/1.8 book as their <link
rel='canonical'>.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Correct. That's a[n| relatively] easy fix.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20130329163351.GB2985@lp-shahaf.local"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I'm not sure what's the extent of the moving-around of content is.
Would "Manually set a custom XML tag on every <section2/> in every old
version of the book" be a feasible and semiautomable (i.e.,
automable for those <section2/>s that did _not_ move around, and manual
for the rest) process? [1] The build process would then be patched to
render those tags as <link rel='canonical'/>.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
The word "manual" is disallowed in this conversation. :-) Also,
I'd prefer that the DocBook sources be, you know, valid DocBook as
much as possible. Further, the problem won't be with
<sect2>'s that have moved so much as for <sect3>'s --
the <link> tag is scoped to cover the entire page, and we
can't really say on a <sect3>-by-<sect3> -- or, in the
extreme case -- <para>-by-<para> basis where the updated
content might live. And it makes sense that we'd have this
limitation, as the <link rel="canonical"> tag was designed to
help search engines canonicalize their links to the <i>exact same
content</i> reachable by different URLs. Our use of it for the
purposes of trying to point folks intentionally to <i>different</i>
content is not in keeping with that design.<br>
<br>
It might be more sensible to add header/footer matter to all the old
book version which says, "Hey, please note that you're reading a
really old version of this content, which is fine if you're still
running the matching really old version of Subversion. Otherwise,
we strongly suggest that you visit <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/">http://svnbook.red-bean.com/</a> and
peruse the appropriate version of this book."<br>
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