Designing Help System for 2.0

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

GDP members,

Congratulations!  GNOME 1.2 is out and I think we can all pat 
ourselves on the back for doing an excellent job of writing up 
a fairly complete set of very good documentation.

Now that 1.2 is behind us, we can start what many of us have
really been looking forward to - designing and working on the 
new GNOME help system we will ship in GNOME 2.0. (This is scheduled 
to be released this fall.  See the GNOME Road Map for the release
schedule: http://developer.gnome.org/status/roadmap.html.)

There are very few things which have really been decided about 
the new GNOME help system.  There will probably be some rather
dramatic changes, such as a new help browser (probably part
of Nautilus) which will allow cross-referencing of documents, 
indexing, searching and a glossary, context sensitive help, a virtual 
filesystem layer for help documents, and some other goodies.  
However most of these features have yet to be fully designed or 
decided upon.

Generally, we have a lot of flexibility to make the new help system
however we want.  If I can paraphrase the wisdom shared by documentation
gurus Jonathan Blandford and David Mason at GUADEC - we should 
design the new help system from the users' point of view. So, think 
about how you use help documentation (in all its various forms) and 
try to design the best help system to serve you as the user.  If you 
have any non-Linux systems, look at how they deal with help 
documentation and decide what is good and what is bad with those 
systems.  There is no shame in borrowing good ideas from a competing 
operating system.  We should also be able to come up with some
completely new help features which others will want to borrow from us.

When all the great ideas start rolling in, post them to this list for
discussion.

With some careful thought and planning now, I think we can have a 
help system in GNOME 2.0 which puts all the other help systems to 
shame :)

Dan