Online documentation version switcher

[Carreau]

Hi, I'm astonished to not have found a similar issue, I apologize if it does exist but I didn't found it. I might have used the wrong terms.

It would be convenient in the online docs to turn the div#versioninfo into a doc version switcher.

div#versioninfo is this thing on the bottom right corner of documentations pages:

At least a stable/nightly selector. I can imagine a switch between major versions later. It is not obvious for the newcomer what the URL scheme is. I just tried a few before figuring out it was nightly and not latest.

You think might want also to set a <link rel="canonical" href="http://doc.rust-lang.org/path/to/same/stable/page" /> to avoid google indexing the nightly too much, and also as the same page is available under /foo.html and stable/foo.html, that should (IIUC) de-duplicate search results and increase ranking.

I'm not too sure of where to fix that, and where are all the valid urls published on docs.rust-lang.org.

Thanks.

[steveklabnik]

I believe this is #24336 and rust-lang/cargo#1681 and also elements of #14466

So yeah, nothing exact, but similar.

[kzys]

I'm working on #44687 currently. The demo site is http://rust-pull-request.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/44687/std/

[jyn514]

I don't think this needs to be a general purpose rustdoc feature, since docs.rs already shows different versions and you'll only ever have one version available locally. I do think this would be nice to have for the standard library though - I think that could be written with existing rustdoc features using --html-after-content and some javascript:

        --html-after-content FILES
                        files to include inline between the content and
                        </body> of a rendered Markdown file or generated
                        documentation

[jyn514]

Mentoring instructions: First, write some JS that injects the right versions into the page, where the version number is now. Then, add it to the rust-lang/rust repo and add --html-after-content your_file.js around here:

rust/src/bootstrap/doc.rs

Line 430 in b7ebc6b

.arg("--markdown-css")

If that works well, we can figure out if and how to backport this to the existing documentation.

[ehuss]

@jyn514 I think one of the solutions currently being looked at is to use Lambda@Edge to inject a switcher on doc.rust-lang.org (see https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/adding-outdated-notices-to-archived-versions-of-documentation/12281/17 and #44687. This would allow switching for all pages (not just the std API). There are various issues with a javascript-only approach that a server-side approach would work better (viewing docs locally, handling new releases, etc.).

[jyn514]

Should this be closed in favor of #44687 then?

[ehuss]

I think so, since the RFC covers this.