URL summary and how it effects the search engine

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

After a nice talk, Jason and I came to an agreement on how to work the
URL's so that he can do what he wants and the search engine can handle
them without us re-writing the whole bloddy thing.  

There is a global PHP page "render.php3" that lives in various
directories.  The location of render.php3 tells it what/how to render
content to the user.  The only thing of real interest for this, is the
fact that all articles will live as:

http://<someserver>/articles/render.php3

render.php3 takes the following arguments:

o - The object position.  This is in essense the drill down.  Stand-in
replacement for the old 'c' variable.

p - The pointer to the actual article.  This is unique for each article
regardless of it's origin.

type - This tells render.php3 how to render the article.  a type=6 denotes
internal content, and a type=7 is for external documentation (like the
LDP).

dN, where N is an integer >= 0 - these are the versioning dependancies
arguments.  Will not be implimented right now.

each article will have a URL in the following format:

/articles/render.php3?o=a.b.c.d&p=X&type=Y

htsearch (the htdig CGI) will be passed a number of variables.  Noteably:

restrict=/articles/render.php3?o=a.b.c.d

This will have the effect of limiting the search to articles in the
a.b.c.d branch or below.  

IF the user wishes to limit their searches to LKBP internal docs then:

exclude=&type=7

IF the user wishes to limit their search to external docs then:

exclude=&type=6

IF the user wishes to search both internal and external docs then exclude
will be unset.

Dean, if I understand the htdig developers correctly, the restrict and
exclude parameters will have already sorted out bad hits.  Hence you
should be able to limit your matching to &p=X as the unique identifier.
[Jason, am I'm correct in assuming that &type=6&p=1 and &type=7&p=1 are
the same article, but that they're rendered differently?  ie, the type
parameter does not effect the uniqueness of p.  If that is not the case,
it isn't a big deal, but Dean and I need to know.]

Anyways, once htdig 3.2 comes out, htsearch will be able to use regexps to
evaluate the contents of restrict and exclude.  At that point will we be
able to support the &dN set of arguments.

Last, Jason, don't forget that Search.pm re-writes each 'hit' URL to
include an additional parameter 'words'.  render.php3 should take this
comma delimted (I use commas to allow phrases in the future) list and
highlight them in the article, by changing their <font color> to red or
something.

--
Aaron Turner, Core Developer       http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~aturner/
Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://linuxkb.org/
Because world domination requires quality open documentation.