Re: Request for comments about Yelp (Helpbrowser)

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 02:04:27AM +0100, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I was playing around with WindowsXP and tried out there Helpbrowser, it
> was very nice indeed. They have the concept of a "Home" where you can
> click on different topics which takes you to the contents-view.
> 
> I'm thinking of implementing this in Yelp, with a Home-view that could
> look something like: 
> http://people.codefactory.se/~micke/yelp/help-home.html
> 
> Clicking on one of the links will take you to the contents-view:
> http://people.codefactory.se/~micke/yelp/yelp-01.png
> 
> What do you all think about this approach?
> 

I like this idea.

So when you click on, for example, "Core Desktop," would it

a) go to a separate page with a list of Core Desktop entires, or
b) pop open a submenu on this "page"?

How are the categories chosen? They should be based on the
ScrollKeeper standard document categories. (That looks like what
you've done, but I want to make sure that is your plan.)

> 
> The other thing I'd like to be discussed is what to do about man and
> info? The problem is that some users don't know what man/info is, some
> other users might want to browse only man or info, etc.
> 
> I think there are three possible solutions:
> 
> 1) Make them there own toplevel nodes: (as man in the help-home.html 
>    view). This is the easiest way (as done in Nautilus today).
> 
> 2) Try to merge them into the rest of the documents (don't ask me how).
>    This is probably hard to do in a good way. It is also (imho) bad 
>    because though people don't have to care about what 'man' is the 
>    documents will not be in the same style as the rest of the documents 
>    which might be confusing anyway.
> 
> 3) Just don't show man/info and only show the documents that are in 
>    Scrollkeeper.
> 

I'm tempted to say have 3 (no man/info) be the default but offer a
preferences option allowing users to choose 1 (separate man/info
headers) instead. I expect, however, that suggestion would be
immediately slapped down by one of the members of the usability crew,
shouting that we should just pick the best option and go with it
rather than tarting things up with endlessly variable preferences.

In that case, I vote for 1. 2 would definitely be unworkable, I think.

Cheers,
-- 
John Fleck
jfleck inkstain net (h), http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/
"A M00se once bit my sister..."