Re: A thought:

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On 27 Nov 2000, David C. Mason wrote:

> Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu> writes:
> 
> > Another solution would be to say very little in this section and
> > then ulink to a seperate document which has all the real content
> > (say "Reporting Bugs in GNOME".)  The help browser will know how to
> > find this document so we don't have the problem we had with making
> > it an entity.  This is the simplest solution which comes to mind,
> > aside from just leaving the text in the template.
> 
> 
> I think you nailed it here. Let the user's *tool* take care of the
> problem. This at least takes a level of complexity out of the hands of
> someone who may be new to SGML, new to DocBook, and new to
> GNOME... but still a valued and valuable writer. Lets explore this
> with the 'help browser team'... is there a team? :)

We have a help browser mailing list now with rather light traffic so far:

http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/gnome-help-system

We are currently doing this same approach with the FDL and GPL references
in the latest template on the web page and it seems to work fine.  We put
the shared documents in gnome-core/core-docs/ and then everything else
just ulink's to them.

The two places where this does not work is (1) when one is using a
non-GNOME browser (eg. KDE's or Netscape), and (2) for documents on the
web. 

It is unfortunate to break compatibility with KDE's browser here.  I
wonder how hard it would be to get this working properly.  I don't know
exactly how hyperbola finds these docs using gnome-vfs, but I would
imagine one (ie. the KDE people) could simply use `gnome-config --prefix`
and easily build in support for the "gnome-help:" URI.  Or is it much more
complicated?  Any help system hackers care to comment?  It would be very
nice if they supported the "gnome-help" URI and we could support a
"kde-help" URI.

Dan