Re: jrb help: XML & HTML

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

Of course, I do want to have a common URI scheme, which works not only
for Gnome docs but also for KDE, LDP, etc and is resolved using
ScrollKeeper - this is the whole idea of Scrollkeeper,
right? Whether this is realistic in time for GNOME2, I do not know...

On a different topic: the main incentive for shipping HTML instead of
(or in addition to) XML is speed. Does anyone have any hard data on how
fast the gnome-db2html3 (based on libxml/libxslt) will work? If it
works reasonbaly fast, I'd gladly join my voice to those suggesting to
get rid of HTML for good. So: DV, jfleck: any estimates? What can we hope
for? 

(For me: reasonably fast means that getting table of contents or one
section of a medium length doc, such as Panel manual, takes under 2
sec on 500 Mhz Pentium III. I'd actually prefer under 1 sec)

Sasha


On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 10:59:15AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> On 4 Sep 2001, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 
> > > Shipping HTML versions of XML docs which we ship...  The potential gain is
> > > that people gain the flexibility of using a help browser which does not
> > > render XML docs.  The main issue here is that Nautilus was painfully slow
> > > on slow machines in the past.  I do not know if all the recent speedups
> > > fix this problem.  The main problem with shipping both HTML and XML and
> > > supporting non-XML browsers is that the help API becomes more complicated.
> > > I think I described this in greater detail on this list a while back, but
> > > the short version is: When foo.xml is converted to HTML, you get a handful
> > > of HTML files with anchors.  Thus, you cannot merely specify a position in
> > > the doc by the (path, XMLfilename, XMLid)  triplet when calling
> > > gnome_help_foo(). You need to specify the HTML filename and anchor, which
> > > take the place of the XML filename and id but are different.  I believe we
> > > have four solutions:
> >
> > Perhas I misunderstood this but it isn't (XMLfilename, XMLid) that you
> > call gnome-help with, is it?
> > You call it with (DocumentName, SectionName) which is then looked up in
> > ScroolKeeper to a (Filename, tag) (where tag could be the name of an
> > HTML-anchor).
> 
> The GNOME 1.x help API explicitly referred to HTML documents by giving an
> HTML filename with anchor.  The simplest way to transition to to GNOME 2.x
> is to add new functions which behave similarly but refer to an XML
> file and id.
> 
> If we wanted to put ScrollKeeper in the middle, we would do so using a URI
> scheme which extends beyond GNOME and works with KDE, LDP, etc. docs.
> Then all our docs and apps would refer to other docs using this URI
> scheme, and ScrollKeeper could act to resolve these URI's (into file: or
> potentially http: or other).  I think this may be a really nice way to do
> things and would be within the scope of ScrollKeeper, but we aren't at
> this point yet and probably won't be in time for GNOME 2.  (Especially
> since the GNOME 2 platform is supposed to be frozen.) If people like this
> approach (or dislike it), speak up and we can decide whether this goes on
> our TODO list.
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
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