Re: Proposal for GNOME-2.0 help system

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

I have some problems with Jonathan's suggestions. Assume I want to see
docs for gnotravex. What URI I should enter in help browser?

 Natural choice would be "ghelp:gnotravex". But according to the
 suggested API, support of this form of URI is optional, so help
 browser may not understand this. 

 I could enter the "relative URI": gnotravex/filename. But what file
 name to use? If it has docs in xml/sgml format, then it should be 
  gnotravex/gnotravex[.xml, .sgml]

 If not, it has docs in HTML format, and filename should be 
  gnotravex/index[.html]

Since I do not know beforehand, the system forces me to try both
manually (not to mention that 99% of users would never guess either of
these schemes). 

It becomes even worse for crosslinking between docs. At the moment, we
use <ulink url="ghelp:appid">; again, since the support of this scheme
is optional, we can not rely on it. 

My suggestion: change the proposal as follows: 

--------------
Support of "index" scheme (ghelp:appid) is mandatory. Ideally, it
should be resolved using Scrollkeeper; this is optional. If not, help
browser must be able to translate it to absolute URI like 

<path> = <GNOME_DATADIR>/<appid>/<LOCALE>/<file>

 trying for <file> "appid.xml", "appid.sgml", "index.html" - in this order.
--------------

And finally: maybe it would be a good idea to try supporting KDE docs,
too - maybe we could talk to them and allow for URIs "khelp:"? 

Sasha