Re: jrb's help ideas

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 01:01:37AM +0000, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 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).

Okay, I have to admit that is a good argument. I am beginning to see
your point about a Gnome specific browser with additional
functionality.

Although I still think there is a need for a non-Gnome-specific
solution as well.

> > > 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.

Yes, I do indeed see your point. I never meant to say that a Gnome
browser is a bad thing, only that the lack of non-Gnome help
database access is a bad thing.

Perhaps I should support Gnome going ahead with the Gnome browser
concept while pursuing a non-Gnome-specific approach also? I will give
it some more thought.

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

Free Dmitry Sklyarov!  http://www.freesklyarov.org
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