Re: help browser plan

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 10:04:02PM -0800, Miles Lane wrote:
> Please take a look at the screenshots here:
> 
> 	http://www.geocities.com/miles_lane/
> 
> These are shots of the Help system bundled into VisualStudio.NET.
> There are several things I like about this system.  It relies
> on Explorer's ability to have plugged in rendering code and UI
> code.  The help system appears to be implemented as a set of
> UI extensions that get loaded into Explorer when it is launched
> with certain flags and is pointed to XML and other files that
> define the UI presentation (where things get docked and so on)
> and the content structure.  The other nice thing about this
> implementation is that it means that for a given help context,
> only the needed UI widget code gets loaded, reducing memory
> footprint and providing maximal flexibility.  
> 
> Is anyone up for implementing a similar system for Gnome?
> 
> Our current help browsers are way too under-featured and 
> inflexible.  

Steady on a bit! :-) For starters, we already have a system for marking
up content -- DocBook-XML and there is already a lot of content in that
format or in the process of being converted to that format (previously
it was DocBook-sgml 3.0 and the changes required to move to DB-XML 4.1
are pretty routine). The markup already allows a number of things that
can be "actively" interpreted by an appropriately enabled help browser.

However, we don't want to make dependency on flashy features a
requirement, since that would remove the ability to print out help files
for off-line or more convenient (to some people) reference. It would
also make accessibility a _lot_ harder.

Finally, in the background of a lot of the help browser discussions
(particularly on gnome-doc-list), there has always been an
acknowledgement that having a default browser is good and allowing other
browsers to seamlessly replace them is great.

Now, having said all of that, there is still room for a full-featured
all singing and dancing help browser. It just needs to have some way of
understanding DocBook markup and turning it into appropriate content.
How it does this (via XML description files or whatever) is up to the
designer. So I don't want to rain on your parade about what you perceive
as a good interface. but a lot of your first post and some of the above
seemed to focus on the content description side of things, which is
already a settled issue.

There is also the side problem that the reason this "what is the help
browser" topic came up initially is that time is running out and we
don't even have one completely working one yet for GNOME 2. So a new
advanced help browser is certainly not the solution to the default
scenario, but it would be a great project to see develop.

(Bugger ... that all sounds much more negative that I intend it to, but
at least it explains my thoughts.)

Malcolm

-- 
For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism.