Re: help browser plan

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 07:54:09PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes: 
> > Right now, the top 3 candidates, mozilla, gtkhtml1 and gtkhtml2, all
> > sound like they won't be ready in time.
> > 
> 
> Well, there are two mitigating factors for help browser:
> 
>  - the lib doesn't need to be API/ABI frozen, it can be "internal"
>  - it only needs to display our usual DocBook output, it doesn't have
>    to handle arbitrary web pages
> 
> I would think we could get one of the HTML viewers ready, given that.
> It's not like gnome-help-browser was stable, and we lived with that
> for ages.
> 
> Shipping sans help browser isn't an option really (though using the
> one in Nautilus is an option, I'm not sure it makes things easier).
> 
> Anyway - regardless of how screwed we are for schedule, the point
> stands - what is the plan? We need a plan. We need to know which HTML
> thingy to start fixing, and which framework the HTML thingy will plug
> into. i.e. if someone is going to start solving this problem today,
> where do they start?
> 

Our plan is to use Nautilus as our default browser, not because we
like it or want to use it that way, but because it is the browser we
know we have.

It is not ideal, and if we have the option of a more lightweight
alternative, I would be in favor of it. Having to use big ol' Nautilus
just to read help has been a frequent source of user complaints, and
the trickiness of Nautilus/Mozilla compatibility is the most common
help-related Nautilus bug report I'm seeing right now.

Mikael Hallendal has been working on a GNOME help browser based on
DevHelp that he's calling Yelp, which uses gtkhtml2 and apparently
sorta works.

To meet our needs, it would need to use ScrollKeeper to generate its
list of available help documents. Also, Louise Miller at Sun has
added the capability to build a searchable meta-index of installed
help docs, giving us our first real search capability. That now lives in
hyberbola in the Nautilus help sidebar. It or equivalent functionality
would have to be included in any new help browser. This is
important. I assume it could easily be ripped out of Nautilus
and put somewhere else.

If Yelp or something like it can be made to work as our primary help
browser, I'd be in favor of it.

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