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

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2001, John Fleck wrote:

> What about docs that don't specify a stylesheet? What about docs that
> specify a stylesheet that isn't installed? We can come up with
> solutions to test for and deal with these situations, but I think
> we're adding needless layers of complexity. And we're asking non-GNOME
> people to do more special stuff so we can properly handle their docs.
>
> I'm uncomfortable with OMF specifying stylesheet information that will
> be very GNOME-specific. I'm likewise uncomfortable with the docs
> themselves specifying GNOME-specific stylesheet information. We're
> drifting away from the generic-ness of DocBook, which is its virtue.
>
> I'd like to come up with a more simple test to determine which of the
> three it is, and then apply the appropriate stylesheet. If it's not
> any of them, then use a fourth generic stylesheet.

I don't want to make things too complicated, but I don't expect that
handling multiple stylesheets will be very hard.  The hardest part will be
keeping the stylesheet catalog.  This should not be a big deal I don't
think.

I'm not worried about documents which don't specify a stylesheet.  These
documents are just displayed with the standard Norman Walsh stylesheet.
Similarly, invalid stylesheet requests can just fall back to the default.
Of course you shouldn't have invalid stylesheets if people put the
appropriate dependency information into autoconf or the package info
anyway.  Most GNOME apps would depend on a GNOME stylesheet which is
shipped with gnome-libs or gnome-core probably.  Packages could also
potentially ship a special stylesheet which is only used by the docs in
that package if they want, although very few would actually do this.

This should not make things any more complex for application developers
and packagers unless they want to use a customized stylesheet.  So, I
don't see this as a burden on anybody except whoever writes and maintains
this part of the help system.  Also, nothing about this should be
GNOME-specific.  In fact, if we don't get the LDP and KDE to sign onto
this, then there is no point in doing it.

I don't want to push this too hard if others don't like the idea.
However, I don't think it would be too hard to do, and I think a lot of
groups (KDE, GNOME, LDP, Mozilla, various Linux/Unix/BSD distributors, and
others)  would take advantage of this feature and may more likely adopt a
common help system* if it allowed them to still control the appearance of
their documents.

Dan

* I'm moving toward the idea of a free help system to be shared by these
various groups/distributions. Among other things, it should be able to
display any document so that it appears the way the author intended
independent of the desktop or browser the user is using.  It isn't clear
how much of the code should be shared and how much should just follow a
similar specification.  I think we all have a lot to gain by working
together to develop a common help system however.