Stylesheets [was: Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: Help API for GNOME 2.0]

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On 14 Jul 2001, Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net> writes:
>
> > Folks -
> >
> > Much to comment on here. I'll try to incorporate responses to most of
> > the thread, but I'll break some bits out into separate
> > missives. Thanks to Dan for thinking this through and getting us
> > started.
> >
> > On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 04:34:52PM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> > >
> > > 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:
> > >
> > >         gnome_help_display(path, name, linkid)
> > >                 path = path in $PREFIX/share/gnome/help (as GNOME 1.x)
> > >                 name = doc file name, without extension (it will search
> > >                        for .xml, then for .sgml)
> >
> > If we're using some sort of a caching system to speed up rendering (as
> > our KDE friends have decided to do), it also needs to search for a
> > cached copy of a rendered doc first before looking for xml and
> > sgml. (This may be especially important for the big docs David Merrill
> > has discussed. I think it makes sense to match our caching system up
> > with KDE's so we'll be able to easily read one another's cached docs.)
>
> Do you cache chunking data or HTML?  Would we need to share stylesheets.

We haven't discussed how we should deal with stylesheets, so we should put
a little thought into this.  What do we want?

(1) We use one stylesheet for all documents
(2) Each group of docs (eg. GNOME docs, KDE docs, LDP docs) gets one
stylesheet
(3) Each document/package is able to specify and/or supply its own
stylesheet.

I always thought we would at least have #2, so that GNOME docs could put a
little footprint icon at the top and KDE docs could put their logo at the
top if they wanted.  However, I could also imagine things getting really
messy if we allowed a lot of configurability.

Thoughts?

Dan