Re: docs chunking status

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

fre 2002-04-12 klockan 13.58 skrev Sander Vesik:

> It has *a* version of chunking - mine gives you just the toc if you call
> it with teh file name and gives you the 
> 
> 	[previous]	[top]		[next]

Ok, where is the patch so that one can try it out?

> > > 	* yelp is presently making assumptions that need to change -
> > > 	  Hallski doesn't like it because it will make things less
> > > 	  efficent
> > 
> > Yes, what I don't like is the fact that using chunking with the current
> > implementation of gnome2-db2html makes the gain from caching the
> > documents much less interesting.
> > 
> > Yelp used to use the chunking-stuff so that only the section asked for
> > was displayed. I changed this a while back since it was more-or-less
> > unusable because of the speed at which you could view the documents.
> > 
> 
> Not having chunking makes larger help style things totally unusable. Try
> say the user guide (or even just the nautlius user manual). Even much
> shorter things like gedit is quite painful.

1) in what way is it painful? Because you can by accident scroll out of 
   the section you intended to look? I get the feeling that people most 
   often don't know where in the document the information is so that
   they start by going to some section that is closest to what they
   think and then scroll out from there.

2) Is it less painful than to have to wait for 4-5 seconds between each 
   section. (this is with the current version of gnome2-db2html which
   noone seems to want to care about).
 
> > > 	* The efficency problem largely comes from the fact that presently
> > > 	  we are just executing and external program and then pulling the
> > > 	  data back. The initial "make things faster" fix would be to have
> > > 	  yelp intercept a special "we just want to repapply the stylesheet 
> > > 	  on the doc" uri so we don't continously reload docbook dtd and
> > > 	  stylesheet.
> > 
> > Before anyone rewrite gnome2-db2html to do some internal caching or
> > comes up with a scheme that solves this I think that we need to rethink
> > the usage of chunking, because at current it would be totally unusable.
> 
> you wouldn't re-write gnome2-db2html, its a fine program for its purpose.
> But as you want to keep the dtd, stylesheet and document around withour
> reloading, the hundred lines of code that does this is probably best moved
> into yelp, and then used for special uris directly.

Well, this would mean that I would have to redesign the internals of
Yelp quite much since I assumed that the gnome-vfs uri way was the
correct way of going.

I guess I can do that, it should then be done for the man and info stuff
too. The bad thing about this is that we are then left with Yelp and it
would be much harder for anyone to write another help browser in the
future.

So, really, someone should make a patch that fixes gnome2-db2html and
changes yelp (I can probably do that sometime at the cost of not being
able to do other stuff that I want to do in Yelp).

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal

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