Yelp Help

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

The gnome help system needs some serious loving.  It is absurd how long
it takes to load even simple help documents in a Yelp window, especially
considering the end result is simply a very basic-looking HTML document.

Something as simple as the help document for the calculator takes
several seconds to load, even discounting the extremely long time it
takes the Yelp window to even appear.

Complex documents like the gnumeric yelp seem never to appear.  The CPU
will churn forever, as far as I can tell.  I've never actually had the
patience to wait for the document to load.  Presumably it's measured in
tens of minutes.

This requires some attention.  I see a couple of open bugs for yelp
about speed-related issues, but nothing to address the core issues of
why the heck is it so slow and what in the world is it doing?

Apparently, yelp spends all this time doing XSLT transformations.  Why
can these not be simply precompiled?  This would also allow us to also
use fancier stylesheets.  In cases where this is not possible, yelp
should be able to at least cache the documents resulting from the
transformation.

If for some reason none of this is possible, we need to rethink the way
the help system works.  Because currently it is decidedly unhelpful.

-Rob