Re: Standardizing help paths

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna freeserve co uk>]

Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> We can already put ID fields in the DocBook sources, so we should use
> them.  We need a reliable way to map these IDs to the final HTML
> sections.  Mark and Dave say that this can be done.  If that is the
> case, then all is easy.  I don't know if this is a valid URI, but we
> could use "ghelp:appname#id", where id is the one you put in the
> DocBook source.

We already do some of this in gtk-doc, for fixing cross-references
between docs.

Owen set up our stylesheets so that they output an index.sgml file
listing anchors with relative URLs like this:

<ANCHOR id ="GTK-EVENTS-PENDING" href="gtk/gtk-general.html#GTK-EVENTS-PENDING">

Though we only look for anchor and refentry elements at present, and
we don't store a human-readable description.


> Now, a question for the DocBook wizards.  In addition to IDs, there
> also is "anchor" tag, which marks a spot in the text.  Is this
> relevant for the help stuff?  Semantically, how is it different from
> the IDs?

I don't think there's much difference. I think anchor is just used as an empty
link target, i.e. when you don't want to use another DocBook element as the target.

I mainly used anchor for link targets in gtk-doc. Unfortunately I can't
remember if there was any reason for that. (I was new to DocBook then.)


(Is the developer documentation produced by gtk-doc supposed to be integrated with
the above ghelp system?)
 
Damon