What an Help browser should give

[José Fonseca <j_r_fonseca yahoo co uk>]

I hope I'm making the enquires in the right list. Please redirect me if 
not.

Currently the gnome help browsing system is able to read the man and info 
files installed in the system besides the HTML files, but I find that the 
navigation is still cumbersome. Nautilus, for example, provides a TOC but 
it's not possible to search a function by name or make a full text search 
on the documentation.

The problem comes from the HTML files, which alone don't have the 
information as TOCs or indexes readily avaiable for being parsed by tools 
such as help-browsers.

The Windows HTML Help systems solved this problem by bundling with the 
HTML documentation XML files for this exact purpose. I searched for 
available tools that provided me the same features and found Dox 
(http:/dox.berlios.de/) and devhelp (http://www.devhelp.net/).

Although Dox was as feature rich as devhelp, it was based on QT so it 
didn't fit on my vision of what a desktop should be (Gnome of course).

devhelp is still rather limitate: doesn't have the abilitie to have 
indexes of different categories (e.g., functions, keywords, macros..) or 
diferent levels (keyword, topic, subtopic...). And most unfortunately 
seems to be somewhat inactive, judging by it's mailing list...

I don't have GTK knowledge but I want to get on devhelp development 
because the effort I may spend on it is justified for my ends alone. At 
the same time I think that more people may be interested so I would want 
to do this properly.

So, besides of searching for people willing to help coding GTK, I would 
like to get people opinion of what precise information should one have (in 
XML) about a set of HTML documentation files, besides the obvious TOC, and 
how should it be structured.

Once this is established, the existing tools for DocBook, texinfo and 
latex can be easily modified to generate the required information, since 
this is all.

Nothing limits this application to HTML, but HTML is really the biggest 
problem now. If a help browser dealt with DocBook directly, all this 
information would be easy to get, but it's not viable to render DocBook in 
real time.


Since the GDP deals with the same subjects of documentation organization 
and is familiarized with these concepts I thought this was a good place to 
ask.

I hope I was not wrong.


Regards,

José Fonseca


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