Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc cu-portland edu>]

On 10 Jul 2001 16:34:52 -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> We need to update the GNOME help API for GNOME 2.0.  For now, I'm just
> thinking about the calls to bring up the help browser and not pop-up
> help.

Good place to start.

> The main question we need to answer is whether we want to support
> HTML-only help browsers. If we can assume that the only help browsers
> people want to run can handle SGML/XML (ie. Nautilus), then we can do
> something simple like:

Hmm.  At this point, there are only two browsers that I know of which
are planning to support viewing DocBook docs natively, and both are
still in development (KDE and GNOME, if that wasn't obvious).
Right now, I'm thinking that having the converters (converting DocBook
and man/info pages) in Nautilus isn't the right place for them, as this
hinders creating alternate help browsers, for whatever reason someone
might want one.  
We need some uniform method for applications to load up their manual.
The application shouldn't need to know anything about the program that
will be displaying the manual, it just needs to be able to say "open to
the Table of Contents", or "Open to the section about fooing with bar".
If that doesn't work, can somebody help me understand why, and what else
the application should need to tell the help browser?  

I'll wait on replying to the rest of this message until I see some
replies on the above, so that I don't sound silly for talking about
things that I don't yet understand.
	Greg