Re: gnome-help: uris

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

Back to the uri issue, because it's my only problem left with
rendering all ScrollServer documentation properly, including internal
links.

The problem is that if you're not in the Gnome Help Browser, uris like
gnome-help: just don't work. They never get fed down to the http
server. So the Gnome-specific uri won't work. It has to start with
http:// and go from there.

I could work around this by just hacking the xsl stylesheets so that
gnome-help gets converted to http://gnome-help/ but do you think
that's a good solution? It's awfully kludgy. The clean solution is a
standard uri scheme for us all to use. We all have to be able to parse
the documentation that's installed in ScrollKeeper.

I searched the archives and came up empty handed, so I don't know how
this fits with your current design.

On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 12:14:31AM -0500, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 9 Sep 2001, David Merrill wrote:
> 
> > I'm having a problem with gnome-help: and similar uris. I knew that
> > those were being made available in the help browser for the user, but
> > I didn't realize that they were being used as uris in ulinks within
> > the docbook source. I need to figure out how to handle them.
> >
> > Can anyone give me some pointers on how they are processed internally,
> > or how I might deal with them?
> 
> Most, if not all, of the URI resolution is done in gnome-vfs.  I think it
> isn't doing anything too complex.  I think gnome-help:foo gets resolved
> into something like:
>   1) $PREFIX/share/gnome/help/foo/<locale>/foo.xml if it exists.
> If not...
>   2) $PREFIX/share/gnome/help/foo/<locale>/foo.sgml if it exists.
> If not...
>   3) $PREFIX/share/gnome/help/foo/<locale>/index.html
> 
> Then you have to handle targets: gnome-help:foo#target
> If you look in the archives of the gnome-help mailing list, you can find
> an email where I enumerated each case and how the target gets expanded.
> If I recall correctly, for SGML and XML the target is just the id and I
> think it gets expressed as .../foo.xml?target.  For HTML, I believe it
> becomes .../target.html.  I don't trust my memory on this right now
> though, so you may want to check the archives.
> 
> Does it make sense to just use gnome-vfs to resolve these links?  This is
> one option, although I'm not sure if you wanted a lot of dependecies for
> ScrollServer.
> 
> At any rate, this points to a more fundamental problem with how we are
> doing things.  We have cooked up our own half-baked way of resolving URI's
> which will be a pain for KDE or anybody else to be compatible with.  KDE
> is using some other system.  We really need to come up with a URI scheme
> which can be shared with other projects to improve compatibility and make
> our lives simpler.  I suspect ScrollKeeper may be useful here.  I think we
> really need somebody with some spare cycles to focus on this problem a
> bit.
> 
> Dan
> 

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