Re: KDE2 model webpage

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2000 battery841@mypad.com wrote:

> 	As we start planning for GNOME 2.0, I thought it would be
> helpful if we look through different help systems and decide whats
> good and whats bad, so we can try to make GNOME 2.0 have the best help
> browser ever.
> 	Well, today I took an hour or two out of my schedule and made a
> little webpage that outlines the KDE2 help browser.  Please check it
> out and lets get some discussion about goods and bads about their
> implimentation.
> http://www.crosswinds.net/members/~battery841/helpshots/ Take it easy
> everyone.  Lets get some e-mail packets sent around regarding this.
> Kevin

Thanks Kevin for putting this together.  This is a very useful summary,
especially since most of us do not have KDE2 on our systems and
many of us would have to download it over a modem.

Based on these screenshots, the browser layout looks very similar to that
used by Windows and some other systems.  The appearance is very clean,
simple, and familiar which would be appreciated by most users, especially
newbies.  

The one part which I am not clear on is the Man/Info tab in the middle (in
place of the Index tab for M$'s help browser). How does this work?  It
looks like it is limited to man and info pages.  Is this working like
apropos?  I think the Index tab, which does a first-word-search along
section titles, is probably worth keeping - I think it is by far the most
common way people find documents in systems which have it.

Do you know how it deals with documentation inside an application?  Is it
in a protected environment?  For example, if I am running Gnumeric and I
go to the manual and search for "printing", do I only get information
about printing in Gnumeric, or does it also give me information on "lpr",
printing in GIMP, and other things?  Maybe this is a given, but I think we
probably want to have protected environments for searching, and probably
for the Index and perhaps even the Contents tabs as well (assuming we have
these).

Dan