Hi all,
For over a year (nearly two years?), I've been asking HP to improve
the interface and search capabilities of HPSL...both for Web users
and modem/telnet users.
Nothing has been done, as far as I can tell.
I have a proposal ... if enough people think this is a good idea, maybe
it can be brought about.
HP could take the HPSL database files, and put them on a workstation
outside their corporate firewall, and have them accessible as unformatted
web pages (i.e., a <PLAINTEXT> at the start).
Within a few days, maybe a week, we would AUTOMATICALLY have a rich
set of search tools for searching these pages...courtesy of
altavista, excite, etc! In other words...for incredibly little effort
or cost, HP could easily give us high quality search access to the
documents in the HPSL database...and they wouldn't have had to write a
single line of search code.
Why would this not happen?
1) HP may be unwilling to let competitors see the number, extent, and
type of bug reports.
I say: tough...it's a far better *selling* point that HP is open about
bug reports. If a potential customer says "you have a lot of bugs",
HP can simply say: *we* weren't afraid to make the information public,
has IBM/DEC/Sun/whoever done that?
2) Disk space requirements.
I doubt this would take more than 8 to 16 gigabytes, a piddling amount
of disk (particularly if HP still has some old HP-brand disk drives
they can't sell now that they've dropped DMD :)
3) Effort.
There shouldn't be much. I'm not asking for fancy formatting...
just a <PLAINTEXT> line at the start of each document.
(<PLAINTEXT>, although "deprecated", tells a browser that the entire rest
of the file should be displayed in a fixed-space font, with no formatting
whatsoever. The suggested alternatives, <PRE>...</PRE> aren't adequate
as they could get terminated accidentally.)
What do you think?
--
Stan Sieler [log in to unmask]
http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html
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