Re: Standardizing help paths

[Karl EICHWALDER <ke gnu franken de>]

Federico Mena Quintero <federico@redhat.com> writes:

|   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.

No, it cannot ;)

The longer I think about it, the more I'm convince the GNOME Help System
should not care about HTML at all.

|   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?

Unpredictable.  Once converted to HTML, the anchor will be "hidden" in
the HTML file (the anchor will depend on the generated filename).  It
might work for 9X % of all cases, but it isn't clean.

The Help System should work on XML documents directly.  It's easy to
convert DocBook SGML to DocBook XML (try `sx').

Using XML IDs are unambiguous.  Available techniques may help to extract
parts of an XML document (you know these big words: SAX, DOM, XPointers,
XLink, DSSSL's query language...?) and to convert these pieces into HTML
on-the-fly (as long as GTK doesn't offer an XML widget).

I hope, we can avoid Java, though.  Python, isn't this an option?

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