Message-ID: <1333040870.4554.10.camel@vanquo.pezone.net>
Subject: Re: Adding links to alternate versions of doc pages
From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
To: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>, Greg Sabino Mullane
	<greg@turnstep.com>, Pg Docs <pgsql-docs@postgresql.org>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:07:50 +0300
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On ons, 2012-03-28 at 21:14 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> You can add the dropdown fairly easily in the website code. However,
> that assumes that no pages have *changed filenames* between versions.
> Which is not true. That would either drop those versions from the
> list, or generate a 404. I'm not sure how to create some sort of
> mapping between versions that would actually work without being
> actively maintained (and if it has to be actively maintained, it will
> go out of date).

Not that those cross-version links wouldn't be useful (in fact, I often
would like to have them when starting at the latest version going
backwards), but they don't really solve the underlying problem.  I don't
really believe that it is a general search engine behavior to always
prefer the oldest resource among alternatives.  For example, if I search
for something like "presidential elections", I surely don't get links to
the oldest presidential election on record.

A related problem: At least a search on Google will usually find the
documentation of some old version.  A search on Bing, however, doesn't
find the documentation at all.  That indicates to me that there is
something seriously wrong in how the web site is constructed.