Re: jrb's help ideas

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 02:49:30PM -0700, Chris Lyttle wrote:
> On 3 Sep 2001, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> Its my turn to disagree with you here, what David is talking about doesn't
> have to be static, hell it doesn't even have to converted from XML/SGML.
> In the web server world dynamicly generated websites are preferred over
> static pages. There is no reason why a help system couldn't talk to a
> 'help' webserver and use all the scrollkeeper, TOC, glossary, etc features
> we can think up. As David suggests this would be so much more powerful as
> it would be accessible from the command line via a browser such as Lynx
> and in X.

Yes, exactly.

> > > 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...
> 
> This sounds like almost exactly what David is talking about. Programs like
> Devhelp, Encompass, Nautilus or whatever should be able to access this
> server as well as a generic html browser.

Yes! Yes! Yes! ;-)

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

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