nav cgi-script

The nav script produces a navigable tree of the pages referenced from a given page (a map).

It can be called using two syntaxes: default and explicit.

The second syntax allows to override the default depth of the tree (but please consider that large depths result in load in the web server!).

The file name is given without specifying the root directory of the vob tags mount points. This name is not the same on different sites, so that this is hoped to help with the portability of the script. The actual setting is in a separate CCwwwutil package.

The behaviour of this script is based on certain assumptions:

• The output of this script could be used by the user as a basis to produce a compound document, and thus to check its content.
• Used the title tags where found, as text for the links. This is sometimes not as good as the h1 tags, which are made to be found in the text and not in the header, but occasionally there will be several h1 tags in the pages, in which case it is often wrong to just pick up the first one. Also, the leaf pages are not parsed. For them, the initial text in the links is retained.
• Only local links (not explicitly mentioning the http server) are considered.
• Only html pages are considered.
• Only links within the body of the pages are considered.
• A footer, separated with a <hr> tag is expected. Links below this last tag are taken as navigational links or external information, and will not be explored (but are collected into a compound footer).
• Files are only processed once, and even only appear once in the output. The location of appearance is the first met during the top-down, width-first traversal. However, a first appearance in a footer will not take precedence over a later appearance in a body.
• The script attempts to preserve the order of appearance of the links.
• Links to locations within pages are ignored, i.e. treated as links to the pages themselves. This is the grain accessible to SCM.
• Errors during the navigation are skipped but collected and displayed on top of the page produced.