Yelp and the Future

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

The a11y problems we currently have with Geckofied Yelp are pretty much
a showstopper for anybody that needs assistive technologies to read or
activate widgets for them.  While not nearly as bad as we had at first
thought, it's certainly not good.

The current status is that a11y tools can read the contents of the page,
but they can't see or activate links.  That would be like being able to
see all the menu items in an application, but not being able to click on
any of them.

I have no intention of trying to re-implement gtkhtml2 on HEAD for 2.10.
There were just too many features added that rely on interactions with
the rendering widget, and I don't even know how to implement most of
them with gtkhtml2.

Given our a11y requirements, it looks like I'll have to sit out another
release cycle.


This brings up a question of policy.  Without Yelp 2.10, there's no hard
run-time dependancy for gnome-doc-utils, but Bug Buddy is already using
the build utilities from gnome-doc-utils.  This requires gnome-doc-utils
to be present to build Bug Buddy, even from tarballs.  While the .make
file is included in the tarball, some of the stylesheets are needed to
build the OMF files.

As I see it, we have three options:

1) Make gnome-doc-utils a dependancy anyway.  This would just be a build
dependancy, and wouldn't affect binary packages.
2) Revert the gnome-doc-utils usage in bug-buddy, annoying any
translators that were looking forward to the joys of xml2po.
3) Copy and dist the db2omf.xsl stylesheet, statically processing the
single xsl:include it has so that no other stylesheets have to be
included.  This would definitely fall under the heading of "feature".


Anyway, we should make decisions on this stuff.  Just like we should
have made a decision on the default theme, and we still should, and jeez
could we please change that damn thing in 2.12?

Pulling Yelp does have the one advantage that I can focus on our (really
outdated and sucky) documentation for 2.10.  Maybe someday I'll find a
comaintainer.

--
Shaun