Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On 11 Jul 2001, Gregory Leblanc wrote:

> On 10 Jul 2001 16:34:52 -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> > We need to update the GNOME help API for GNOME 2.0.  For now, I'm just
> > thinking about the calls to bring up the help browser and not pop-up
> > help.
> 
> Good place to start.
> 
> > The main question we need to answer is whether we want to support
> > HTML-only help browsers. If we can assume that the only help browsers
> > people want to run can handle SGML/XML (ie. Nautilus), then we can do
> > something simple like:
> 
> Hmm.  At this point, there are only two browsers that I know of which
> are planning to support viewing DocBook docs natively, and both are
> still in development (KDE and GNOME, if that wasn't obvious).

A help broswer does not srictly speaking have to be a web browser. 

> Right now, I'm thinking that having the converters (converting DocBook
> and man/info pages) in Nautilus isn't the right place for them, as this
> hinders creating alternate help browsers, for whatever reason someone
> might want one.  

You can always use existing/programs/libraries to do the conversion. There
are several that may serve as the basis...

> We need some uniform method for applications to load up their manual.
> The application shouldn't need to know anything about the program that
> will be displaying the manual, it just needs to be able to say "open to
> the Table of Contents", or "Open to the section about fooing with bar".
> If that doesn't work, can somebody help me understand why, and what else
> the application should need to tell the help browser?  
> 

Well, I think the principles behind what Dan proposed are sound and mostly
do that...

> I'll wait on replying to the rest of this message until I see some
> replies on the above, so that I don't sound silly for talking about
> things that I don't yet understand.
> 	Greg
> 

	Sander

One day a tortoise will learn to fly
	-- Terry Pratchett, 'Small Gods'