Re: jrb's help ideas

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

måndag 2001-09-03 klockan 20.58 skrev David Merrill:

> The whole `help browser' concept is flawed. Why can't the help be made
> available via http so any web browser can be used? Hell, you could
> write it in perl or python if you wanted.

I do not agree with you hear, while providing things for use in any
browser (static HTML-pages) is good in some way (which you mention
here). It's bad in others, like for example, you can make a much better
and easier to use TOC if you for example use a Tree-widget.

Also searching is much easier and more powerful (with things like
autocompletion on searchterms and a automatic, always showing possible
hits list).

Static HTML doesn't give you any of these features. You can have what we
have in the current help browser (gnome-help-browser) but I wouldn't say
that it is very good.

I _do_ agree with you on the other point you are making (see below), and
with such a concept I think we should be able to have different outputs
(ie. static html/some other way of communicating with the client/and
whatever we can think of is good).
 
> I'm both a gnome and a kde user -- I go back and forth depending
> on what I'm doing. I don't want to see my system help changing
> depending on which desktop I'm using. I really don't want to learn two
> help systems. And, I'm often not using a desktop at all, and I still
> need to get to help on the console.

What scheme does KDE help use?

> We need a system level server that provides access to a help database
> that is not so gnome or kde specific. It should be able to serve any
> document in the scrollkeeper database transparently to any browser can
> supports html and http post/get.

We have actually started to look at a solution like this at work
(www.codefactory.se) and will start look into this issue next week. 
The ideas sprang out from DevHelp, and having a middlestation between
the actual documentation and the viewer. So that you can get information
from man/html/sgml/info/whatever and output them in
text/html/xml/whatever...

While I think this solution would be the best it's not in the timeframe
for Gnome2. But I'll get back to this list when we have started to look
into this issue more.
 
> Not only is this faster (lynx is gonna beat anything you can do in a
> gui) but also more flexible and powerful.

In speed yes but in powerful/flexible, hell no!

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal
 
-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
CodeFactory AB                  http://www.codefactory.se/
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