Mailing List Archive: Apache: Docs

End of life for 2.0 documentation?

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rumble at cord

Jul 13, 2012, 6:12 AM

Post #1 of 9 (536 views)
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End of life for 2.0 documentation?

Yes, it's grumpy old me again, singing the same song from before.
It appears that Google et al are still showing our 2.0 documentation as
a preferred page when searching for various modules and keywords, and I
still don't like this. I'd like to propose that we add some meta data to
our 2.0 pages, more specifically:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
or
<link rel="canonical" href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/"/>

So that search engines will refrain from indexing the old docs and
serving them up as results. This may be seen as a drastic/bold move, so
I'm asking the docs ML what they think of it, and if there are other
suggestions as to how we can make our (older) 2.2 and (current) 2.4 be
the preferred results shown when someone is searching for information.
In essence, this would retire the 2.0 documentation, which should only
be the case if httpd 2.0 itself is deemed retired, but I have yet to see
any announcement of such. Does anyone know if this is in the works?

I won't steam roll this into the docs, but I'd really like if we could,
at some point, come to an agreement about retiring the 2.0 documentation.

With regards,
Daniel.

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covener at gmail

Jul 13, 2012, 7:26 AM

Post #2 of 9 (523 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Daniel Gruno <rumble [at] cord> wrote:
> Yes, it's grumpy old me again, singing the same song from before.
> It appears that Google et al are still showing our 2.0 documentation as
> a preferred page when searching for various modules and keywords, and I
> still don't like this. I'd like to propose that we add some meta data to
> our 2.0 pages, more specifically:
>
> <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
> or
> <link rel="canonical" href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/"/>

I think some kind of hint would help, a quick google search for me
shows DirectoryIndex has 2.0 as first result but AllowOverride has
2.4.

However, I think (naively) calling /current/ the canonical version may
stretching the semantics a bit. So maybe the former?

It would be cool if each page in the manual had a persistent link to
toggle the version being displayed (where applicable!). If only there
was someone who wasn't afraid to generates pages of commit messages :)

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rumble at cord

Jul 13, 2012, 7:48 AM

Post #3 of 9 (524 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On 07/13/2012 04:26 PM, Eric Covener wrote:
> I think some kind of hint would help, a quick google search for me
> shows DirectoryIndex has 2.0 as first result but AllowOverride has
> 2.4.
>
> However, I think (naively) calling /current/ the canonical version may
> stretching the semantics a bit. So maybe the former?
>
Yeah, perhaps it's better to start out referring to the 2.2
documentation as the 'upgrade' for 2.0. I have been researching a bit on
how it's done, and it seems that the best approach would be to add the
canonical tag for each individual page, f.x. mod/core.html would then
have the following tag:
<link href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html"
rel="canonical" />

This is an automated process, and may refer to some non-existent pages
where the 2.0 and 2.2 modules differ, but Google claims to be able to
sort this out by themselves.

> It would be cool if each page in the manual had a persistent link to
> toggle the version being displayed (where applicable!). If only there
> was someone who wasn't afraid to generates pages of commit messages :)
That's an idea as well, and while I'm not against it in any way, I think
it may just be a whole lot of manual work if I were to add a 'version
changer' for each applicable page. But I'll think about that as well - I
have a tendency to go ahead and make crazy things like this anyway ;)

With regards,
Daniel.

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niq at apache

Jul 13, 2012, 8:10 AM

Post #4 of 9 (518 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:26:35 -0400
Eric Covener <covener [at] gmail> wrote:

> If only there
> was someone who wasn't afraid to generates pages of commit messages :)

You only need to update the XSLT transform. Or rather, one such per language.

Oh, wait. We keep the generated HTML in svn as well. Whoops!

--
Nick Kew

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rainer.jung at kippdata

Jul 13, 2012, 8:28 AM

Post #5 of 9 (519 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On 13.07.2012 16:48, Daniel Gruno wrote:
> On 07/13/2012 04:26 PM, Eric Covener wrote:
>> I think some kind of hint would help, a quick google search for me
>> shows DirectoryIndex has 2.0 as first result but AllowOverride has
>> 2.4.
>>
>> However, I think (naively) calling /current/ the canonical version may
>> stretching the semantics a bit. So maybe the former?
>>
> Yeah, perhaps it's better to start out referring to the 2.2
> documentation as the 'upgrade' for 2.0. I have been researching a bit on
> how it's done, and it seems that the best approach would be to add the
> canonical tag for each individual page, f.x. mod/core.html would then
> have the following tag:
> <link href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html"
> rel="canonical" />

This is something Rich did for the 1.3 docs earlier this year. He
actually was using the "current" links then.

Example from /docs/1.3/invoking.html:

<head>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org" />
<link rel="canonical"
href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/invoking.html"/>

<title>Starting Apache</title>
</head>

> This is an automated process, and may refer to some non-existent pages
> where the 2.0 and 2.2 modules differ, but Google claims to be able to
> sort this out by themselves.
>
>> It would be cool if each page in the manual had a persistent link to
>> toggle the version being displayed (where applicable!). If only there
>> was someone who wasn't afraid to generates pages of commit messages :)
> That's an idea as well, and while I'm not against it in any way, I think
> it may just be a whole lot of manual work if I were to add a 'version
> changer' for each applicable page. But I'll think about that as well - I
> have a tendency to go ahead and make crazy things like this anyway ;)

:)

Regards,

Rainer

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rumble at cord

Jul 13, 2012, 12:31 PM

Post #6 of 9 (518 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

I take it then, that no one would be terribly upset if I added a
canonical reference in the 2.0 branch to the 2.2 branch. I think
pointing to 2.4 at this point would most likely just confuse both people
and the search engines, since so much has changed since 2.0.

This first update (I'll get on that right away) will be for the sake of
search engines (hopefully) displaying at least 2.2 as recommended
reading instead of 2.0. I'm not so sure about adding the 'noindex' meta
tag to it just yet, since that would most likely make it invisible to
people even if they searched for 2.0 documentation. We need to come to a
decision on whether to retire the 2.0 docs before we should make a move
like that. And once we have that decision, we can do with 2.0 what we
did with 1.3.

With regards,
Daniel.

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isoma at jellybaby

Jul 14, 2012, 5:38 AM

Post #7 of 9 (514 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On 13 Jul 2012, at 20:31, Daniel Gruno wrote:

> I take it then, that no one would be terribly upset if I added a
> canonical reference in the 2.0 branch to the 2.2 branch. I think
> pointing to 2.4 at this point would most likely just confuse both people
> and the search engines, since so much has changed since 2.0.

There might be a Link: relation type that means �superseded by�. 2.0 was superseded by 2.2, 2.2 by 2.4, etc.

I'll have a look. It costs little to add, and somebody or some bot might find it useful.

--
Tim Bannister � isoma [at] jellybaby

Attachments:

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rumble at cord

Jul 15, 2012, 10:32 AM

Post #8 of 9 (510 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On 07/14/2012 02:38 PM, Tim Bannister wrote:
> On 13 Jul 2012, at 20:31, Daniel Gruno wrote:
>
>> I take it then, that no one would be terribly upset if I added a
>> canonical reference in the 2.0 branch to the 2.2 branch. I think
>> pointing to 2.4 at this point would most likely just confuse both people
>> and the search engines, since so much has changed since 2.0.
>
> There might be a Link: relation type that means �superseded by�. 2.0 was superseded by 2.2, 2.2 by 2.4, etc.
>
> I'll have a look. It costs little to add, and somebody or some bot might find it useful.
>
Yes, that's exactly what the canonical link type does, and that's what
I've implemented in the 2.0 docs.

I am happy to report that, thanks to those links, Google now lists the
2.2 documentation instead of 2.0 when searching for common issues or
modules.

With regards,
Daniel.

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rbowen at rcbowen

Jul 16, 2012, 10:22 AM

Post #9 of 9 (501 views)
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Re: End of life for 2.0 documentation? [In reply to]

On Jul 13, 2012, at 9:12 AM, Daniel Gruno wrote:

> Yes, it's grumpy old me again, singing the same song from before.
> It appears that Google et al are still showing our 2.0 documentation as
> a preferred page when searching for various modules and keywords, and I
> still don't like this. I'd like to propose that we add some meta data to
> our 2.0 pages, more specifically:
>
> <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
> or
> <link rel="canonical" href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/"/>
>

Coming late to the party, a comment or two:

1) For the 1.3 docs, obviously, I had to add those rel canonical links by hand to each HTML file. Ew. As such, there are still many of those docs that don't have it, and so are still top of the Google results. Patches welcome.

2) The biggest difficulty with adding these rel tags automatically is when docs change name, or disappear entirely, between versions. In those cases, we need to do something special. It's not obvious to me how to do this automatically without generating broken links in those cases. That would obviously be bad.

Other than that, I'm very much in favor of this change, and think it's a great service both to the end-users and to the documentation team.

--
Rich Bowen
rbowen [at] rcbowen :: @rbowen
rbowen [at] apache

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