Re: new help browser

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> > So, if you put the cursor over the word email, as an example, a box at
> > the bottom of the doc will appear, like a footnote, telling you the
> > definition of email.
> 
> I've never been keen on extra boxes popping up, especially on small
> screens. But I do like the idea of being able to get explanations for
> things. It's going to require some sharp quality control to get
> explanations which are accurate but not impossibly off-putting, but
> there's no reason we can't -try-. 

Yes.  I think we want to avoid having proper windows opening up (1) to
save screen space, and (2) to avoid requiring excessive mouse usage (move
mouse to new window and click on close).  This may be avoidable by using a
tooltip-type popup which opens under the mouse and disappears with a
single click or mouse movement. 

I agree that creating good definitions will be quite a challenge.  We all
need to be very careful about licensing too, as we should produce
completely FDL'd definitions if possible.

> What I'd like to see instead is something which relies very much on
> what I saw of Nautilus being demonstrated at GUADEC. Like most file
> managers, it looks like this:
> 
> (Beware! ASCII art!)
> 
>         |----------------------------| (titlebar,
>         |----------------------------| okay? :))
>         |        |      lots of      |
>         |  tree  |      icons/text   |
>         |  view  |      here         |      
>         |        |                   |
>         ------------------------------

A bit of background to Telsa's beautiful ASCII artwork: 

This is the general layout of Nautilus (two vertical panes beside each
other).  I'm not sure what the naming is, so for now I'll call the left
one the "navigation" pane and the right one the "view" pane.  (Anybody
know the real names?)  The idea is that the left "navigation" pane shows a
higher level of information and is used to find information, and the right
"view" pane shows the detailed view of the information.  This is how the
Nautilus file manager will be layed out, and is similar to M$ Explorer, M$
Help Browser, and probably many other help systems.  At GUADEC, we
discussed using this layout for GHB 2.0.  We are, of course, open to other
suggestions too.

If we were to follow M$'s help browser, the Navigation pane would have
three tabs: Contents (a heirarchical tree view of documents sorted by
topic), Index (first-letters alphabetical browse through the index), and
Search.  (paraphrasing the names)  This is a pretty good layout, but
we don't have to copy their layout if we can come up with a better one.

I really like Telsa's idea of adding a glossary as another tab in the
navigation pane.

[snip]

> Second, what I would call an index, which would be slightly different.
> Assuming we can get cross-referencing and linking to other docs to 
> work, have "related pages" listed on the left. Anything that's marked
> up as a <ulink>, <olink>, or something else implying there's more
> information elsewhere, gets a mention on the left-hand pane. So it has
> a list of "related docs" on the left, so people can use that to jump 
> around.

I like Telsa's idea of having "related pages". Should these be in the
Navigation pane or the View pane?  If we put it in the Navigation pane, I
guess it would have to be its own tab.  How do we populate the "related
pages"?  I'm not sure if we want to just list things which are already
linked, since the user already has these links and there may be other
related pages which are not linked in the text.  Maybe each document
should have these related pages listed in it?

> This of course requires someone who can code to make it possible
> for those two views to be selected instead of the the tree view.
> Are any of us actually subscribed to the nautilus lists? I have 
> no idea of the state of nautilus development, nor whom we should
> talk to about whether it will do particular things and whether it's
> appropriate for us to ask, "Can it do this, please?" :)

Does anybody know Eazel's stance on this?  I had the impression that the
GDP would decide how the documentation part of Nautilus is designed and
then we would find one or two developers who would implement our design.  
Really, I would be surprised if Eazel did not want to play a more active
role.  Any representatives of Nautilus/Eazel listening who would like to
comment?

Dan