Charging by local IRs

"Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet" <woeber at cc.univie.ac.at> writes:
>>BTW, technical curiosity: how do you intend to keep track of dangling
>>     pointers in the "new RIPE Web"? Carol mentioned that aspect briefly
>>     in the plenary report but didn't go into details...

Hi Wilfried,

Basically it works as follows. With the exception of a few top level
pages to be maintained by hand, the pages made available on the web
site will be formatted using a variation on the t/nroff ms macros 
(We could have used latex, but the majority of RIPE documents had
already been formatted with ms macros).  

I'll use the example of the "RIPE database" as a typical string that 
should lead one to the Golden Truth about the database whenever it
appears in a document published on the web site. The brute force
procedure is to make a link to the Golden Truth wherever the term 
is used.  Of course, as soon as a new Golden Truth document (or 
section of a document) is written, all links are out of date, and
one is faced with a nightmare, which grows exponentially with the
size of your document store.

Rather than going through the documents and adding links to other
documents, we add tags to say what strings should trigger a link
to us. So in the document that is the Golden Truth on the RIPE
database, you add a tag that says "RIPE database"should point to
it. This can also be done for each section in the document. 
Our software gathers up all these tags in a document specific file.

When the web site is generated (which has to happen whenever docs 
are changed), all the document specific tag files are gathered up
and used to generate links. Then all the document files are searched
to find out where the terms are that should get a link. A HTML 
version of each document is generated based on the formatting
specified by the author and the links generated. And there's your
document store without a dead link in sight. 

Admittedly, there are a lot of little annoying details like what to 
do with partial string matches, what to do if someone adds a tag for 
the term "Internet", what to do when more authors want the same 
term to point to their document, but they are details, and we've
managed them.

Hope that answers your question.

Greetings,

-- Carol