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Since I cannot use POV-Ray anymore (RC1 has expired since yesterday
and there is still no RC2 available as I am writing this), I spent
some time on the documeentation and I noticed some bugs in the HTML
files delivered with RC1 for Linux:
* All HTML files start with a comment that contains a line of
hyphens. Using pairs of hypens in a comment is forbidden by the
HTML standard (this restriction was inherited from SGML) and this
can cause some problems in some validating browers.
Solution: insert spaces between the hyphens (except for the first
and last pair) or use "=" or "_" instead. This should probably
be changed in the makedocs.pl script, which is unfortunately not
included in the distribution.
* It would also be a good idea to start all files with a DOCTYPE tag
because any HTML file without DOCTYPE is supposed to be HTML 3.2,
but these files are using some tags from HTML 4.01 and should
therefore start with this line (before anything else):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
* All HTML files refer to the stylesheet povray35.css, which is not
included in the distribution. Same for a bit of JavaScript that
is supposed to be in povray35.js, although I feel better without
it.
* All HTML files contain a comment saying that the stylesheet can
be overriden by personal settings by "placing a 'povray35.css' file
in the root directory of the disk volume that holds this help file"
This is absurd on a UNIX-like system such as Linux, which mounts
all disk volumes in a single directory hierarchy. It would be
better to remove this comment and the corresponding <link...> tag,
or to use a script that replaces "file:///povray35.css" by a more
appropriate path (based on $prefix) at installation time.
* The file intro.html has a <table> tag that is never closed. As a
result, Netscape 4.x can only display a blank page without any
contents. Inserting </table> at the end of the page solves the
problem.
* Also in the file intro.html, there is a reference to the image
"output/images/logotext.jpg", which does not exist.
* Still in intro.html, the <ul> tag on line 38 should be replaced by
<blockquote>. Also, the <font> tag should be inside the block,
not outside of it.
* The file povdoc_017.html has a broken <a> tag on line 45: there is
an extra </a> inside the first part of the tag.
* The text in povdoc_172.html (line 183 in section 6.2.6.3) contains
an extra word "Switch" that should probably not be there. The
text reads: "In the #range variety, Low_Value Switch and High_Value
are floats..."
There is also a general problem with the installation paths:
according to the GNU Coding Standards and the Linux Filesystem
Hierarchy Standards, most of the POV-Ray files should be installed
in $prefix/share/, not in $prefix/lib/ as this is currently done. If
necessary, I can provide some help there: I am quite familiar with
automake, autoconf and other tools due to my experience with the GIMP
and other software packages.
I am eagerly waiting for RC2. Since the Linux version (and maybe the
Mac version) appears to be released one day later than the Windows
version (which I cannot use), it would be nice to extend the
expiration date of the Linux betas by one day. That would allow the
beta-testers to keep on using and testing POV-Ray without being stuck
with an expired version.
--
http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/
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