Re: Gnome Help Browser

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 05:28:28PM -0400, David Merrill wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2001 at 10:57:09AM -0400, Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> > Sorry for being so slow, I still do not get it. You want *any* browser
> > to be able to access url's like "info:emacs"? But then, not only you
> > need to have some kind of server/port that does the
> > scrollkeeper/man2html magic - that I can understand - but you also
> > need to instruct each and every browser to query this port when
> > resolving man or info or ghelp URL's. AFAIK, if you enter "man:grep"
> > into "location" field of Netscape, it wouldn't know what to do with it
> > at all - even if there is a "mini-server" on your machine that can
> > handle this, Netscape wouldn't know about it.
> 
> Actually, no. I'm not sure what would be involved in making that
> happen in a standard browser. However, I also don't think that feature
> is important enough to justify it driving the system architecture.

Sorry, that was unnecessarily and confusingly terse.

What I am proposing is that the interface be kept strictly to html to
be displayed in a standard browser via http. The help system could,
therefore, be and do anything possible in html, including scripts for
dynamic content, flexible searches, etc.

This makes the help system a very flexible platform, and easily
hackable and extensible. Keep the logic separate from the browser --
it's a win all around.

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

Free Dmitry Sklyarov!  http://www.freesklyarov.org
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