Originally posted by Samir:
A side question related to CDs:
I've been asked by folks in the IAF without high-speed Internet access whether it was possible to get a CD with the entire BR site dumped on to it so that they can peruse it at their leisure, pass it around (in the squadron only), make copies, check out images etc. Is this possible/legal/what is the modus operandi etc? I think I asked LNS about this before who said it was possible but I wasn't sure of the issues involved.
Its possible to a certain extent. But will require a little more work from the admins side. The problems we have with us are:
1. many of the pages are linked with complete urls. i.e to go from Index page to history page, the HTML code uses '
www.b-r.com/army/history/index.html' kind of links. So when you are using the CD from your PC drive, the PC will try to connect to the internet.
To solve this is to have relative urls '../history/index.html' instead of the web url. Blame microsoft for replacing the relative urls with the complete urls. The IAF section will definitely work because all links are relative ones. But there are several pages in other sections that have the full urls in the hyperlinks. We will have to manually replace all of them in HTML editors. This could take some time.
2. Second issue where even the IAF section will fail to display properly are sections where we use PHP pages. For example, The News section, The Officer Database on the IAF site, or some of the new upcoming Gallery/Slideshow which we have done in PHP and MySQL. There is no way for us to display these pages from a CD (or is there?). If someone wants a CD of the IAF section that runs from the CD drive, We can do a copy. with the PHP links blanked off.
For those interested - the whole size of the IAF section is around 120MB. (this after compressing almost all the images to the optimum level) Add the Army- Navy- missiles and others, and I am sure we will push 300 MB in total