GNOME 2.0 Help System Update

["David C. Mason" <dcm redhat com>]

OK fellow GNOME writers.. here's the latest deal.

Today jrb, Sopwith and I had a meeting about the GNOME Help System for
GNOME 2.0 (please no "when is 2.0 coming out" questions - I don't
know!). There are two major things to cover - the GNOME Help Browser
and Context Sensitive Help.

I'll start with Context Sensitive Help - this is pop-up help for those
who know it by that name. The structure for getting this done is in
place in the GNOME 2.0 libraries but there are some things Sopwith and
I need to do before I can show you examples. 

First of all, the system works by the code having identification for
widgets that will contain help. A Perl script will be run on the code
to generate a "map" file. This file will allow the developer or writer
to link widget ids to help topic ids.

The help document is one big XML file that makes use of a very small
set of tags (all of these tags are DocBook tags so you will not have
to learn a new DTD). Each topic is defined by a <sect1 id="blah"> - so
you would have one large document that had a <sect1> for each widget
that has cs help. Since cs help should be very brief but descriptive -
the documents should be relatively tame in size.

What has to happen is that Sopwith and I need to decide how each tag
will be handled (format-wise) as we are not using traditional parsers
for this - this is all being done in gnome-libs. After that we will
make a gnome-libs 2.0 branch that has cs help so you can all see it in
action - I will also write an example, a template, a how-to, etc.

OK - on to the Help Browser. The Browser was first going to be a
separate entity until the Nautilus project started so I have less to
report as this is very dependent on Nautilus.

jrb is working on 'DocBook to Html on the fly' display right now for a
couple of reasons - 1) downloading just sgml is smaller than sgml and
html 2) searching on sgml is smarter. 

What do we lose? well we lose some formatting without dsssl but we
gain valuable time not running jade. The plan is to replace this with
Mozilla, DocBook XML, and XSL when they are all ready - so it is
proactive planning in my opinion.

jrb is also working on the search engine for this. It will be one of
the first search engines I know of to take *real* advantage of
SGML/XML content markup, but he will have to give more details when he
gets further into it.

Sopwith, jrb, and I all decided that *everyone* needs to discuss how
an application is *registered* with the help browser
though. Essentially we want the browser to know when you install
GRandomApp so that it shows up in the TOC and search engine, etc. So
put your thinking caps on and help us think about this one.

Thats the state of the Help Union.

-- 

          David Mason
        Red Hat AD Labs

        dcm@redhat.com