Re: jrb's help ideas

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

måndag 2001-09-03 klockan 21.49 skrev Chris Lyttle:
> On 3 Sep 2001, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 
> 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.

Sorry for not being clear. I didn't mean the actuall contents of a page,
I was talking about the interface (which gets pretty static using HTML,
it renders the page, and has to reload it to change). With a help
browser written in Gtk/Qt you can do much more which makes using it much
nicer. 

If we would to have a html (or similiar) based help mechanism (like we
have today) we would loose some of these nice features. 

I'm not saying that we should make it impossible to use an browser, just
that if you do you'd loose some features that you could get out of a
well written help browser.

And that's the reason why we wrote DevHelp, to be able to use these
features insted of browsing the API documentations in a browser (we
could already do that, it wasn't good enough).

> > 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.

Almost, (if I got him right). David wanted a many-input-on-output
(html-output). That is not what we want, we want a
many-input-many-output so that if you have a program/browser/... that
can do more than just a regular html-browser you want to be able to use
these features.

But when we talk about the default help browser in GNOME 2 I really
don't think that it should be any browser which just gives you the
documents (as the current help browser). I think we should have one that
has the TOC in a nice GtkTreeView (good work jrb) and has searching
(without a having to use an html-form). And this is what I'm currently
writing, you can look at DevHelp if you wan't to know why I think this
is far more powerful than using a browser showing served pages.

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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